Posted by Leon Haller on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:49 | #

A couple of yeas ago I posted what I thought were some interesting and provocative comments to samizdata. Of course, they were removed without any real justification.

Obviously, de Haviland is an excruciatingly PC fool. “Samizdat”? A better and appropriately ironic name for his site would be “Pravda”.

Posted by Foundation on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:59 | #

I only understood about one half of what you were saying GW, but even so I never saw a sheep dog herd sheep like you were manoevering Mr de Havilland. You flushed him out: he enjoys his life - without a thought for the nationhood of the tens of millions who laboured for billions of hours to make this land we call England. If you took his lifestyle away he’d be behind his ‘barricade’ alright, fucking hiding.

Anyone who writes things like ‘nebulous English volk’ is beneath contempt. If my Uncle had heard that back in ‘44 he’d have stuck him with his bayonet. Unbelievable.

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 04:41 | #

Why is liberalism inconsistent with racial understanding?  Why did the Founding Fathers limit Naturalization to “free white persons”?

Race & Groups: The Libertarian Blind Spot
By John “Birdman” Bryant

John Donne could never have been a libertarian because he believed that “No man is an island”, while libertarians seem to prefer a sort of reverse philosophy which holds that every man is an island. In particular, libertarians are so busy celebrating “the individual” that they give little or no attention to a phenomenon which is at least as important as individuals on the political landscape, namely, groups. It is true, of course, that groups can be regarded as collections of individuals, but it would be foolish to try to discuss politics purely on the basis of the behavior of individuals and without reference to groups, just as it would be foolish to try to describe the operation of a computer purely on the basis of the behavior of individual molecules and without reference to such important molecular groups as chips, wires, cards and hard disks.

http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Lbtn/Lbtn-LibertBlindSpot.html

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 04:43 | #

P.C. libertarianism
and the Jewish taboo

By HENRY GALLAGHER FIELDS

American libertarians were once freedom-loving, truth-loving iconoclasts who took pleasure in spurning the shibboleths of Establishment pundits and intellectuals. No dogma was deemed too sacred to be safe from their skepticism, and every alleged truth was subject to examination by free minds reveling in free inquiry. They were totally outside the mainstream, and they relished that position: one thinks of giants such as Frank Chodorov, Albert J. Nock, Murray N. Rothbard, and Roy A. Childs, Jr., standing lonely but unafraid.

But libertarians today, with some honorable exceptions, are a changed breed. They shy away from the ever-multiplying taboo issues, if they do not actually celebrate the reigning intellectual orthodoxy. Libertarian principles are noticeable chiefly by their absence.

http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/fields_pclib.htm

Posted by anon / uh on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 05:17 | #

“Man is not capable of self-authorship, and if he was he could not author anything fully human.  As it is, those who speak of such “liberty” demonstrate their self-estrangement and ignorance of human nature.”

For any who understands the backwardness of all that we call “zeitgeist”, these are the two most devastating lines ever written in refutation thereof.

Didn’t even break de Havilland’s surface.

So much more to read here — but that was arresting.

Posted by FB on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 05:35 | #

Good job even though I’ve been around those arguments for at least 10 years now. Like water torture, I guess they must be repeated ad nauseum.

Posted by Trainspotter on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:07 | #

Fascinating exchange, and most revealing.

Purist libertarianism, as opposed to a natural yearning for liberty as an important value amongst other important values, is revealed here as merely an infantile, thoughtless and crass sort of foot stomping.  Perry wants to do what he wants to do, when he wants to do it.  Of course, this is perfectly natural - by definition all of us want to do what we want to do, when we want to do it.  But as we get further north of junior high, most people mature and understand that there are other considerations that merit attention.  Our horizons broaden, and we begin to grasp that there are other considerations that merit our attention and action.  In short, we mature.  Apparently, Perry never did.

He feels no obligation to the people, culture or civilization that made his life possible.  He certainly cannot be bothered with how such people, culture and civilization are an integral part of what he is, of what he has to be - even as he rejects them and their importance.  He can deny, mangle and distort, he can cup his ears and shout “La!La!La!,” and insist that he doesn’t hear you.  But he is what he is, even though that may be a rather pathetic sort of creature, and he can’t escape fundamentals. 

Perry reveals libertarianism as little more than a demand to be the ultimate free rider.  He cares not that meaningful liberty only arises in a certain context, under certain conditions.  Those conditions required, among other things, sacrifice, trust, restraint and intelligence.  They also required a certain kind of people.  Perry acknowledges none of this.  He doesn’t care so much as a whit.

Sacrifice from Perry?  Trust from Perry?  Reciprocity from Perry? It is to laugh.  Dogmatic true believer that Perry is, he can’t understand that it was not men like him that made liberty possible. In fact, he is the harbinger of the end of liberty, the sort of man that dying civilizations produce in their terminal stage.  He is no friend of liberty, but an enemy, because he denies everything that makes liberty possible. 

As I’ve said before, a purist libertarian society - in the extremely unlikely event that one were ever created - would last all of about 15 mintues before self-destructing. Being blind to race, it would allow (per its dogma) the unlimited inflow of non-white, and very much non-libertarian, immigrants.  These would soon outnumber and overwhelm the myopic and self-absorbed true believers like Perry, and control the society along distinctly non-libertarian lines.  Either that, or the libertarian minority would have to abandon it dogma, and one might even see a neo South Africa emerging.  Either way, purist libertarianism would soon be in the dustbin. 

Even if, for the sake of argument, we spared the purists that particular calamity, there would be a thousand others waiting in the wings, for which libertarianism gives no thought and offers no answers.  They have absolutely no idea how to get from here to there, because they have no idea who we are, where we are from, or where we are going.  Purist libertarianism simply doesn’t work, precisely because it ignores the whole of the Man, what a Man is.  What life is.

In essence, libertarianism is deaf, dumb and blind.  It cannot see, and doesn’t want to see, anything to life and man beyond juvenile demands for consumption and self-indulgence.

Lacking even the capability of defending their own supreme value,  it is impossible for them to go deeper, as GW asks. Personal liberty isn’t the only value in the universe, to the exclusion of all else?  Unthinkable! to the dogmatic Perry. 

I particularly liked this jewel from the little viper:

“You think you are “one of my people” simply because you are English?  Think again.”

LOL!  It never occurs to Perry that the brazen and shameless disloyalty and contempt he shows his own kind may be returned upon him.  Why exactly should the English protect Perry’s property?  Why should they enforce Perry’s contracts?  Why should they protect Perry’s very life?  Why should some working class English lad render assistance if a pack of Perry’s beloved Pakis were torturing or killing him in the street?

Why, indeed?  Does libertarian dogma give us any solid ground to stand upon in answering these questions?  What is Perry to me, and why should I take the slightest risk on his behalf?  Why shouldn’t I follow my own self-interest instead?   

Why should the English go one tiny step out of their way, or suffer even the slightest inconvenience or risk, to benefit Perry?  The answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t.  Them’s the breaks.

The day may be coming when they won’t.  But for myopic, narcissist Perry, this never occurs to him.  We’ve now had a couple of generations where treason and disloyalty have gone entirely unpunished, and in fact rewarded.  The Perry style vipers of the world, being astonishingly short sighted in all manner of things, somehow imagine that this is the final disposition of the universe.  Somehow, I rather doubt it.

Posted by FB on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:58 | #

If your arguments are unintelligible or fly over your opponent’s head, what have you achieved beside some ego-gratifying intellectual onanism to impress the equally perplexed and bored peanut gallery? GW’s willful opaqueness reaches perhaps 5% of the public, is that a useful debating method or just “putting on a show”?

Posted by Trainspotter on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:02 | #

“GW’s willful opaqueness reaches perhaps 5% of the public, is that a useful debating method or just “putting on a show”?”

I agree, generally speaking, that the message must be presented in such a way that the audience can comprehend it, and no doubt much of what GW said went over many a head.

On the other hand:

1. GW might have reached a handful of really bright people that are capable of digesting what he had to offer.  For some of them, this might have been the first time that they have been exposed to a different, and meaningful, view of the world - ever.

2. GW’s “show,” if you wish, prevented Perry from simply playing the old “dumb bigot” canard with effect.  Any reader, Perry or otherwise, would immediately recognize that GW is anything but dumb.  If nothing else, this exchange is a nice counter to the massive amount of system propaganda over recent decades.  Even if the meat of GW’s posts went over some heads, I guarantee that a fair number of people at least came out of it with a vague impression of high intelligence mixed with concern for race.  That’s a plus.  Sometimes the message is the messenger.  If the target audience can dismiss you out of hand, as they are trained to do, then it’s all over before it begins.  GW didn’t fall into that trap. 

3. As Foundation noted above, GW flushed the little viper Perry out.  As a former libertarian myself, I can tell you that they very much suffer the conceit that they are highly intelligent.  They are accustomed to dealing with dimwits who don’t really understand how markets work, even the elementary basics of supply and demand, etc.  In a shallow and materialistic society where debates tend to focus merely on how we can all consume more, or perhaps consume in a more degenerate environment, libertarian arguments can work just fine.  Therefore, so long as the libertarian can keep the argument at the level of Econ 101, it is easy for him to feel superior to his sparring partner.  Outside of that bailiwick, however, they know NOTHING.  They have nothing to offer.  GW’s exchange made that point quite nicely, I thought, and I seriously doubt that Perry is happy about it.  Again, flushed out nicely.

Posted by Mr Voight on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:54 | #

GW’s willful opaqueness reaches perhaps 5% of the public, is that a useful debating method or just “putting on a show”?

Useful debating method.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:27 | #

@GW - brilliant, simply brilliant, my friend. You were on form there. That really cheered me up on this drab Sunday morning.

To elevate and fetishise individual ‘autonomy’ about all other values is indeed child-like and deeply immature. Mature people realise that for example the ‘right’ to abuse your body with mind-altering (presently illegal drugs) isn’t of the same order of right as to freely express opinions. Indeed there are many conflicting values – one cannot be genuinely mature if one doesn’t recognise that all social formulations require the careful balancing of these values, desires, wants etc. Indeed for anything we might call ‘social’ there must be restrictions upon the individual parts to avoid anti-social ‘free-riders’ from destroying the very basis of sociality. This is true for intra-genomic conflict, multicelluarity, ant-colonies etc., so why or how could human societies possibly avoid this phenomenon?

As Aristotle recognised so long ago any healthy polis is a balance between the individual and the collective. We don’t need the false hyper-collectivism of fascism or communism, nor the hyper-individualism of unrestricted liberalism. The former options are obviously unworkable but the latter is far more subtly destructive of the long-term health of society.

Aristotle held that the whole is necessarily prior to the parts, to a polis however this ‘whole’ or collective political community would need to have both homogeneous and heterogeneous qualities.  Indeed there can be no other sustainable society without balancing such factors.

Aristotle wrote:

“It is true that unity is to some extent necessary, alike in a household and a polis; but total unity is not. There is a point at which a polis, by advancing in unity, will cease to be a polis: there is another point, short of that, at which it may still remain a polis, but will none the less come near to losing its essence, and will thus be a worse polis. It is as if you were to turn harmony into mere unison, or to reduce a theme to a single beat.”

Every political form can be said to rest at some distinct coordinate on the continuum of identity and difference. Just as there can be no absolute identity between parts and whole – ontological fusion – there also cannot be complete “differentiation” or non-identity, for then we could no longer even speak meaningfully of a society or community. Liberal thought based on the fiction of radically autonomous subjects, pursing maximally individualistic goals, ignores this insight. Hyper-liberal, radically diverse (ethnically and in other ways – lifestyles etc.) societies trash their social and cultural capital (very long in the making and easy to destroy).

But such idiotic liberalism well it is also the gloom of the grave. It does dirt on life and the rich tapestry of being in the world. Think of all the history of collective, cumulative sacrifice that allows any of us to enjoy our present existence along with the personal sacrifice of one’s own parents etc. Is not a family is most important valuable and natural ‘collective’ in one’s own life? This libertarian idiot probably doesn’t have children. But for most normal people within the family is the primary ‘social’ space in which one can be beloved and in turn love others. Life can be endured without many things but a life without genuine love and deep attachment to others is a poor thing indeed.

As Roger Scruton has written the nation, our collective community, (implicitly our ethnic-cultural group) is our ‘larger home’ - an extended family – one in which we share collectively and are ready ultimately to collectively sacrifice our lives in order to protect our beloved home in the world. Scruton is really excellent on the social-capital issue and his essay on ‘preserving nations’ is very good.

@Trainspotter

Agree with much of what you wrote – expect that the typical libertarian is highly intellectual. Really they strike me as little yappy dogs that think their one idea represents the totally of possibilities – hardly an intelligent approach to anything. They seemingly have not been aware of Edmund Burke, nor of the problems of ‘free-riders’ and the tragedy of the commons. No they are ideologues, in the worst sense of the word, that take a partially true idea and think that it represents the whole of the truth. No, no, no! Life and the world at large is far more complex.

Liberalism the the ultimate in ‘free-riding’ ideologies. Let me do whatever I want no matter how social and culturally damaging those actions might be in the long term. What an impoverished, ahistorical, and utterly false ‘social ontology’ that liberals embrace.

P.S.

@GW ‘Levelling out’

Yes the levelling out issue – yeah I think that’s important as it’s a really devastating and ‘progressive’ objection to universalism. In its own way as important an issue as the more famous ‘tragedy of the commons’. The levelling out issue obviously raises the question who can properly be included in the ‘in-group’ by establishing that under certain criteria universalism is radically sub-optimal even from its own values/perspective.

A line of thought worth developing – you know my intellectual jujitsu vibe - using genuinely liberal ideas against themselves and turn the liberals arguments inside out. Liberal theory might have enormous ideological plasticity but equally it’s full of profound and totally unresolved contradictions.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 13:04 | #

Of course I also wanted to add that love can never be universalized - it is always a ‘local’ phenomenon - particular to people, time and culture.

Love is historical, temporal, and particularist.  People that genuinely claim have 1000 ‘close’ friends don’t know what a close friend is.

One of the hallmarks of liberal modernity is rationalism and rationalization, the progressive reduction of the lifeworld to quantifiable procedures and methods, but the Enlightenment project has disfigured our relationship to the non-human world and, in turn, has led to our own disfigurement. Is not, at base, our problem of the recovery of what was sacred all along, the irreducible, qualitative manifold of being-in-the-world.  That being in the world cannot be rendered uniformly/universally homogeneous, or emptied of meaning, without unleashing a great violence against nature and upon ourselves.

Perhaps we need to recover the divine in the brute existence of animal being. A ‘religion’ of immanence rather than transcendence, or rather, a transcendence through consciousness of immanence signifies the reversal of Abrahamic religious conception of the human soul and a return to the ancient view of the soul not as mind but as anima or spirit: affirmation of ‘the soul’ here understood as the irreducibly singular manifold of the living being-in-the-world.

Effectively ontologizing freedom by locating it in the body and the heart would imply that love and the pleasures of sensual embodiment, not primarily in moral or other forms of autonomy, are constitutive of freedom. To speak of ‘ownership’ of the freed self means not, as in liberal ontology economic ownership/labour-power etc., but ownership in the phenomenological, embodied sense of ‘having and belonging’ in the world.

There is no genuine human freedom in separateness or aloneness; the free human being is not so much a social animal as an animal that desires to be ‘loved thoroughly’ and as such be ‘at home in the world’. The meaning of freedom this is to be the state of ‘being beloved’.

In Sanskrit, freedom is derived from the word beloved, the condition of being among one’s loved ones. Freedom as love, that is a fierce attachment to the ‘this’ of the world, to embodied being, through a community that enables authentic love-of-self (sensuous existence). It is the love of embodied, sensuous being, the mere ‘animal’ love of affection, companionship, sexual ecstasy, the joy of being alive that ultimately stands behind every emancipatory struggle. We must liberate ourselves from the conceptually thin, anti-human, disembodied effluvia of hyper-liberalism!

If taken seriously this is something of an epochal shift in our ontological self-conceptualization to say nothing for our economic, cultural and social modalities. We are ‘divine’ not because we are made in the image of a rational ‘God’ but because the divine exists at that moment when Being knows itself - touches itself – and hears its own ‘song’. In replacing the onto-theological story with one of an onto-poetic story of immanence might we affect the re-enchantment of the natural world and in turn of ourselves – the revelation that we are worthy of such life-sustaining love.

Existentially and ontologically this striving of being-in-the-world towards a fullness of being, a striving manifested in the perpetual ethical dialectic between autonomy and solidarity, self and others is wrongly identified as the ‘will to power’ in Nietzsche’s pseudo-naturalistic ontology, but in reality is ground in love. The objective is to defend this eros – the life-principle, from every social deformation rooted in thantos, the death drive.

The defence of Being understood here as not Absolute but as this being-in-the-world, this brute animal existence is not merely affirmation of the wonder of sensuous being. It is a vigorous ethic and passionate politics to defend our lifeworld. Today is the fight for life, the fight for the love of ourselves and our histories, our cultures and our collective survival. Is this not the political fight?

Posted by Selous Scout on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 13:25 | #

Pure genius, GW.

Although, I suspect, in the end, low-IQ people such as Perry de Havilland will simply need to be punched in the face and forced to bow.

Civilisation, after all, survives through force and violence.

The more time I spend at MR and similar sites, the more I’m convinced that Violence Is The Answer. (As it has been for thouands of years).

Violence works.

Posted by anon / uh on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:23 | #

Gentlemeng, after viewing this video, I have revised my opinion of the Breivik Affair. I trust you might also reconsider in light of this comprehensive analysis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGXxckUKVAs&skipcontrinter=1

Posted by Leon Haller on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:25 | #

Not relevant to this post except generally, but I strongly suggest people read The Economist article I pasted to the recent anti-jihadist thread.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:37 | #

Friedrich,

In the thread wars it is always necessary to dominate the opponent from the high ground, which can be moral or intellectual or both.  If that domination is really just somebody’s show-time, it does not matter.  What matters is to demonstrate the complete supremacy of our Weltanschauung to the unseen observer.

I listed some of the rules for thread warfare here:

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/this_thread_business/

The intellectual worth of the Samizdatista, meanwhile, is on display here:

http://www.samizdata.net/mt/93uhdy736.cgi?entry_id=14368

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:39 | #

It’s nice that some folk appreciate my scribblings on that Telegraph thread.  However, there are better contributions on display right here.  I hope people appreciate that.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:31 | #

LOVE IS LOCAL

DIVERSITY IS DISTANCE

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:47 | #

Love is local.
Diversity is distance.

If Jews were from Jupiter,
they couldn’t act stupider.

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:53 | #

Here, Dr. Greg Johnson enters into an Objectivist site, to try to discuss genetics.  This may be important enough to bookmark.  He is stonewalled.  (may have posted earlier)

From: Ellen Moore <ellen_moore@mb.sympatico.ca>
To: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Subject: ATL: Peter Taylor asks me about volition and IQ
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 14:43:02 -0600
Peter questions,
“What is the difference between people and animals? Do we have innate intelligence or is it entirely volitional? Would Ellen Moore please address the issue of IQ?”

Peter, it is my judgment humans do not have innate intelligence. Intelligence is entirely acquired by means of volitional actions directed to conceptual reasoning about one’s perceptions of reality. Rand maintained that “intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions”. Since she also stated “man is a being of volitional consciousness”, that means intelligence is volitionally derived by abstraction and conceptualization by means of reasoning.

There is a sense in which perception could be viewed as a sign of intelligence but that means only that perceptual acuity can be evaluated as keen or less-clear from a conceptual perspective of knowledge. E.g., we all know that observers “see” different things and often are in error about what they think they “saw”. This is a clear incidence that some people have trained their degree of perceptual ability to be more or less accurate. In the Comprachicos, Rand wrote about the fact that, for instance, visual focus is an acquired skill. The thing is, from birth one volitionally trains one’s self, one’s body, one’s mind, and one’s intelligence to deal with accurate observation of reality. One develops these skills in the context of the individual’s physical and mental effort of input and output.

And then there is reason—One has to individually learn how to reason, and learn what reason is. A newborn does this all alone, and how successful one is depends on the effort put out in learning the skills of reasoning.

As for IQ - I pay little attention to it. I know there are people with high IQ scores who are the most inconsistent, and even the dumbest, when it comes to identifying facts and rational thinking. And I know of people who do not score high on tests who are scrupulously dedicated to objectively know the truth, in facts and principles, and that they choose to direct their lives on the basis of principles of reason.

In your quote from Rand, she wrote about human consciousness, “... no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice.”

Rand is speaking of a volitional consciousness, and what each one must do with it in using it perceptually and conceptually. I have always thought that her saying “no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence” is inconsistent with her stated view that the mind is born “tabula rasa”. This latter means that there are no innate concepts or ideas in the brain [mind] at birth. Overall, Rand’s general comments agree with the views that all conceptual knowledge is volitional – not innate. She clearly states across the board that knowledge is based on perception of reality, but that abstraction is volitional, concepts are volitional, and reason is volitional. So, my conclusion is that intelligence is volitional. And to truly be “human” means to be volitional and conceptual, and to reason.

Animals cannot do anything like this - they are limited to perception only.

I’m not sure what more you may want from me, but I’ll answer any further questions.
Ellen M.

The Objectivist movement claims to be diametrically opposed to socialism. Socialism is, basically, the egalitarian philosophy that believes that equality of outcome is the moral ideal.

The Objectivist movement claims that the moral ideal is that each individual rise, or fall, according to how well they develop their talents and how credibly they use. The self-made captain of industry, the Hank Reardon, is consider an ideal man. The lazy, and the slothful are considered the opposite. And those who hate the productive virtues of the ideal man are considered evil.

Objectivism would, therefore, seem to be the anti-thesis of egalitarianism. An Objectivist would not necessarily have to believe that people need to be considered equal in any way. But, the empirical reality, is that Objectivism has as one of its core principles the egalitarian ~belief~ that talents are distributed equally between all persons at birth, and any differences that exist at adulthood are merely the result of that person refusing to make the volitional choice to develop their talents. Thus, the belief is that if the average “epistemological savage” with an IQ of 80, and genius with an IQ of 160 had merely swapped their childhood attitudes about the importance of learning, reading, going to school, doing one’s homework, and intellectual curiosity in general, then the person with the IQ of 160 would have, instead, developed an IQ of 80, and the “epistemological savage” would, instead, have grown to be a genius with an IQ of 160.

The reason that Objectivism adopted this belief is simple enough: it makes their philosophy seem fairer. If talents are unevenly distributed at birth, then Objectivism is simple the philosophy that the genetic cream must be free to rise to the top. Objectivism would merely be a variation on social Darwinism.

Thus we see the spectacle of Rand denouncing the concept of IQ, and “Objectivists” on this list down-playing the accuracy of IQ tests. They don’t want to accept the notion that IQ is a reasonable measure of intelligence that correlations significantly to educational and economic outcome in life. The notion that individuals are born with a basic probability of being well to do, or born with a basic probability of being poor is unacceptable to them.

But Objectivism also demands that we at all time remain objective. Objectivity means seeing things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. Despite of an unholy alliance between liberal egalitarians and genetic egalitarians that has desperately attempted to suppress all consideration of the topic, the scientific case that they are wrong continues to build. In fact, not only is intelligence hereditary, but so is basic personality, to a correlation of about .50. That is, not only is Hank Reardon’s intelligence, basically, an accident of his birth, but also his ambition may very well have been an accident of his birth as well.

Objectivism is, therefore, at an intellectual cross-road. It can stick to an a priori counter-factual belief about intelligence and genetics, and become another pseudo-intellectual movement like creation science, or it can, through the proper use of reason, reconcile its ideology with reality.

Hating Greg Johnson and myself will not alter the fact that what we are saying is true. If we were to stop posting tomorrow, this would not change the basic fact that we are right, and many of the posters here are simply wrong. We can go, or be forced out, but Truth cannot change.

It is not a surprise that Greg Johnson and I have been meet with hatred. If the topics we have broached had been consistently debated in a rational, objective manner, we would have been met with agreement.

You can agree with us. Or you can hate us. But you cannot rationally answer our ideas.
—- DAVID RASMUSSEN

(TabuLa Raza is a play on words with La Raza (the race in mexican).  I utterly do not believe in the blank slate.)

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:54 | #

(link for above)  http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?s=e636d69d04c3b346e18fdd1f4909cc7d&showtopic=8397&st=0

Posted by PF on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:56 | #

Graham Lister wrote:

To elevate and fetishise individual ‘autonomy’ about all other values is indeed child-like and deeply immature. Mature people realise that for example the ‘right’ to abuse your body with mind-altering (presently illegal drugs) isn’t of the same order of right as to freely express opinions. Indeed there are many conflicting values – one cannot be genuinely mature if one doesn’t recognise that all social formulations require the careful balancing of these values, desires, wants etc. Indeed for anything we might call ‘social’ there must be restrictions upon the individual parts to avoid anti-social ‘free-riders’ from destroying the very basis of sociality. This is true for intra-genomic conflict, multicelluarity, ant-colonies etc., so why or how could human societies possibly avoid this phenomenon?

GW, your rejection of ‘self-authorship’ is not kosher. Shall I say why?

Its because you bring a meta-level insight about the nature of man to a discussion of things wholly worldly, and then use that insight to whip beings who have made no claim to want to function at the higher level.

You act as though the philosophy of the day (liberalism) exists to deliver men from the predicament of human externalization, heartbreak and self-estrangement. You act as if liberalism’s claims to self-authorship were meant to answer *this* higher fundamental problem of our existence. But in reality they never were. Liberalism is a neat, to-the-point solution to the problem of statist intervention. Thats all it is. It doesnt address any of the difficulties of our higher nature, but aims to create peaceful and prosperous conditions in the world.

The autonomy of the individual is held as sacred not because the individual is competent, but because the alternative - which is that some state-controlled mechanism step in to legislate some aspect of our lives - is always less competent. People *are* stupid and function from unconsciousness - well guess what - any collective or movement or state-sponsored action is just going to be a bunch of people. They will actually do worse trying to meddle, than individuals do, even if those individuals appear to be struggling. That is the insight of individual autonomy and on the level on which it is supposed to hold, it holds.

Coercion. What is implied in any philosophical rocketry shot off from this website is that statist coercion can save the day. The point of the ‘movement’ is to get enough power so that we can begin to coerce people. In the ringing social critique of decadence such as is authored by the collective mentality of this website, there is the fundamental hope that we can force people to behave in ways we think are good for them. When we lampoon the failures of individualism (which I honestly think is massively weak and falls apart under inspection - essentially complaining about the excesses of mass culture), but dont own up to the weakness of statist intervention, we are excoricating reality in favor of a dream in our heads. How convenient for us! Our universal control scheme gets to remain a pipe dream within our own minds, safe from the inevitable unfurling of its own consequences - while the Zeitgeist is mercilessly taken on because we dont like Justin Bieber, or cops humping black chicks at a parade, or whatever else were uncomfortable with. Samizdata’s dream has played out in the world and is dressed in all the beauty and ugliness of it. Meanwhile Captain Chaos’ vision for the world, or GW’s, or Wandrin’s, would *never, ever* produce any negative consequences which could be lampooned, these visions have been test-driven in the cushy environment of a loving imagination! Nothing would arise from our action that we could not foresee or justify! (and this is an indicator of where the political dreamer is fast asleep…. sweet lullabies of revolution..asleep in the dream of his preferred solution acting as an escape hatch from our shared human problematik.) What I’m saying is that if we applied our critiques consistently to our own power-schemes, they would look as bad as Samizdata’s schemes. Because as an answer to our human problematik, they are just as inadequate.

That is what we would do if we had intellectual integrity, which we do not.

GW, your implicit claim that a philosophical system or political movement can address man’s most personal and intimate problem, is patently wrong. To even dangle that hope in front of people is disingenuous. All this cavorting with mysticism and higher meaning on a political forum is nonsense: it reminds me of the parable of the money-changers whom Jesus drove out of the temple.

Also claiming that your attachments to coethnics are some indication of presence while those high IQ guys rocking out with a Slovenian girlfriend are less conscious…as if our nature got fundamentally rewritten in the last 20,000 years, or even 200,000 years. That is genuinely superficial, to think that life’s deeper meanings are only accessed when working with English genetics. You say that some fundamental law of nature has been broken when you access meaning through looking into a polish woman’s eyes - well first off, how would you know? Did you give the outlanders a chance as vehicles of higher meaning? Or just smash them down because nothing can ever be English enough, nothing can ever be English enough…

Well, that is your own issue, not God’s, which is how you are framing it. (It happens to be my issue as well, of course).

Posted by anon / uh on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:38 | #

The point of the ‘movement’ is to get enough power so that we can begin to coerce people.

Moshe said that two years ago. All set-piece fantasy.

Did you give the outlanders a chance as vehicles of higher meaning?

Wasn’t that Himmler’s job?? lozlzlz

“You are sitting on chairs. You are stuff, using stuff. You enslave stuff.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html

This “Deutschland” jersey and gold watch I’m wearing? Enslaved stuff to enslave a woman’s stuff to receive my stuff.

Let’s reduce everything to stuff. Stuffing stuff stuffly, stuff stuff stuff stuffz,opsoalzololzlzlzz

Posted by anon / uh on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:40 | #

Love is local.
Diversity is distance.

So get stuffed
or join the white resistance.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:49 | #

Love is local is the Hamiltonian rule, no? Altruism arises when there is a direct genetic benefit to the act.

People that genuinely claim have 1000 ‘close’ friends don’t know what a close friend is.

How then is it possible to feel genuine ‘love’ for 60 million co-ethnics if love is local? How did the Briton, the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman become the English if love is local?

Posted by Leon Haller on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:49 | #

Hayekian liberalism is a cause of the coming misery, since it makes man Economic Man, detaches him from his kin, his soil, his race, and offers not liberty but divestment of human meaning.

The main cause, of course, is the swindle of sovereign debt. Greece owes nothing. The “debt” is created digitally and can be repaid in full this afternoon in five minutes at the computer keyboard. The swindle only stands because the Money Power rules politics. (Piggott)

A good biographical essay on Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist of them all, and teacher to Hayek, in an easier to read format than the link I posted to yesterday:

http://lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard272.html

Learn something, please.

I, too, oppose the idolatry of homo economicus, and the privileging of man the consumer over other aspects of the full human being.

But objectionably ideologizing economics does not annul economic truth! The coming misery is hardly the fault of those who wish for governments to live within their means, or who emphasize the commonplace point, understood by all men nearly instinctively before the coming of Keynesian and socialist fallacies, that production must precede and exceed parasitism. 

By all means, let us destroy central (government cartelized) banking, as well as private fractional reserve banking. These are the real swindles. We must return to a strict 100% gold standard (exactly as Ron Paul and the Misesians argue for), which will end all but localized inflation, as well as macroeconomic business cycles (it was Hayek who played the leading role in demonstrating this back in the 30s, Piggott!!).

But doing so in no way obviates the real debts of Greece. The Greek government took enormous loans from Western bankers, often doing so on the basis of deliberately mendacious economic statistics. They then blew that money on current consumption through the mechanism of the pathologically corrupt Greek public sector, which employs half of the Greek “workforce”. Thus far, there has been not the slightest public sector reform: not even a single Greek civil servant has been fired!

Meanwhile, how will those loans be recouped? One way or he other, if not from the Greek parasites, then from other, more responsible peoples, very much including American investors in American financial companies which in turn hold European bank stock and debt. The mechanism can be direct investor losses; EU taxpayers; or EU citizens via inflation following and sovereign debt monetization (or even Americans, because our own stupid, globalist Fed has lent money to the Europeans).

Because I have invested in various American insurance and bank stocks which themselves have invested in European bank debt, as well as Greek sovereign debt, therefore I should be stiffed of my (aliquot share of corporate) money? Are you a fucking communist?

A precise moral accounting (in accordance with traditional bourgeois financial principles) of the Greek fiasco would be difficult to do. There are many culprits (governments at several levels, and maybe private lenders to some extent - if they were being insufficiently risk-averse due to expectations of eventual taxpayer bailouts). One thing is certain, however. The Greeks are guilty as hell - and they must be made to pay their debts themselves (and not Aryan taxpayers in Germany or America, whether through taxation, debt defaults, more loans, or inflation!!).

What ought to be done is a basic confiscation of most of Greece. The islands can be privatized, and sold to foreign investors, as can all manner of state assets. Public sector pension schemes can be eliminated, with tax monies thus being diverted to debt repayment. The Greeks themselves might wish to confiscate the assets of, and hang, the politicians who allowed for this festering mess.

Just think about it this way. A man maxes out his credit cards, then refuses to (or literally cannot) pay. Do you blame the lender - or the cardholder? And should the latter simply be allowed to keep all his purchases, free of charge as it were? What kind of ethics is that?

Many of you here are very confused about not only basic economics, but basic morality. But then, not being Christians, who cares about ethics, right?

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:12 | #

How then is it possible to feel genuine ‘love’ for 60 million co-ethnics if love is local? How did the Briton, the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman become the English if love is local?

Ouch!

Glad you went there first. Now let us ask:

What is Cultural Man without the Economic Man who was his presupposition? is there some economic precedent for Pancake Day? was the culture of literacy possible thanks to stock-breeding and forestry? was Engels right — that culture does not take place in a vacuum, but is fundamentally a reflex of economy?

 

What ought to be done is a basic confiscation of most of Greece.

Don’t the Greeks firebomb foreigners who take over their country? you really wanna stir them up again?

Posted by Rod on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:17 | #

GW, most interesting. Here are the beginnings of your next attempt at ontology. In the above debate you have said more philosophically than your Ontology Project pieces. The next attempt will require you expanding on the following expressions and concepts:

the void of self-authorship, perfectly detached from the “fully human”.
You have no autonomy, for you are not self-conscious. – elaborate on the second part.
pathetic post-Christian appeals to universalism – true but most do not know what is pathetic about liberal universalism.
You do not know your own humanity – true but most do not understand they are social beings – hence they will not appreciate … Autonomy does not exist.
You are not to blame for being a liberal – GW we all sincerely await your contribution to being post-liberal. “You nailed nothing except your own fatuity” – Perry is laying down a challenge. You must rise to his challenge because you can.
You think a sense of ‘belonging’ is what makes you fully human and the source of belonging is heredity – you can never say too much about belonging.

I find ‘belonging’ as something that comes from shared ideas, which is why my ‘Indian pals from IT’ and Slovak (not Slovenian) girlfriend give me all the ‘belonging’ I need, because I like them and share values with them as self-aware adults.  Mere genetics based on value proximity of birth with you give me no reason at all to give a damn about you just because you are English or any sense of shared belonging whatsoever.  Why should it?  The notion is primitive and indeed rather infantile.  It is an inch that can be scratched every World Cup and then tucked away with childhood’s other toys for a few years.  To think a person is just their genetics is to see only half a person. – Perry exposed himself badly here and you dispatch him.

That is why my English particularism rises above the fairground of your universalism – I applaud.

You have been infantilised by Jewish philosophy – well put, a different rendering of “You have Judeo-Christian values”.
there is no special liberal value.  Liberalism is untrue. – Elaborate fully on this and you have written a new philosophy.
your ‘blood’, means nothing to me – I reckon you need a new concept to replace ‘blood’, GW. ‘Blood and soil’ are not wrong, but some new expression arising from ontology and teleology would better fit the times.
Priorness is necessary to the existence of Man – I know what you mean but it would require a chapter somewhere in the middle of a big metaphysic to elaborate on this idea.

At the 25 minute mark you are talking passed Perry, if not earlier. GW the man does not appreciate where you are coming from and that is our problem.

Good contribution Trainspotter.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:21 | #

A precise moral accounting of the Greek fiasco would be difficult to do.

True, Leon, but I tend to think of you as the Wyatt Earp of moral accountants, so jump on your high horse and head them Grecians off at the pass.

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:51 | #

your ‘blood’, means nothing to me – I reckon you need a new concept to replace ‘blood’, GW. ‘Blood and soil’ are not wrong, but some new expression arising from ontology and teleology would better fit the times.

<big>STUFF</big>

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 01:27 | #

Hayek, Friedman, and President Nixon were socialists.  Each favored a guaranteed minimum income.

Does he support a guaranteed minimum income? Hayek: “I have always said that I am in favor of a minimum income for every person in the country.” Does he believe that America needs a central bank? Hayek: “That the monetary system must be under central control has never, to my mind, been denied by any sensible person.”

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0994e.asp

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:04 | #

PF

You act as though the philosophy of the day (liberalism) exists to deliver men from the predicament of human externalization, heartbreak and self-estrangement.

Liberalism has two never entirely reconciled pursuits.  One is the breaking of all bounds and the other is the banishing of all suffering.  It is when we examine the effects of these pursuits on the Western personality - effects, let it be said, that are also generated by the other two great engines of our psychological declension, the sheer artifice of the modern, material existence, and Jewish ethnic activism - that the question, what would a corrective look like, first arises.

I am not trying to address only liberalism, as Rod is, in my view.  I am trying to address all the influences which drive the Western personality towards error, estrangement, impoverishment, and so on.

Forgive me, I really thought that was clear, especially to you.

It doesnt address any of the difficulties of our higher nature, but aims to create peaceful and prosperous conditions in the world.

You are making a divide where none really exists.  “Our higher nature” is our nature.  All that leads towards consciousness of it is good.  All that leads away from it, and into the common abstractions and illusions of the life we have now, is not good.  The movement from the second towards the first is not a movement towards some mass spiritual experience - not in this context.  At all times in human history the possibilities for personality formation are pegged somewhere on the line twixt the more natural, grounded and vivifying and the more unnatural and estranging.

PF, what is true of the personality that is able to negotiate questions of your “high nature” is true of all personality at all times.  It’s just that the context is not an elevated one.  But it is still all too human.

They will actually do worse trying to meddle, than individuals do, even if those individuals appear to be struggling. That is the insight of individual autonomy and on the level on which it is supposed to hold, it holds.

Is Perry de Havilland “holding”.  Or is he in freefall?  I think he is in freefall, and he is not alone.

What I’m saying is that if we applied our critiques consistently to our own power-schemes, they would look as bad as Samizdata’s schemes. Because as an answer to our human problematik, they are just as inadequate.

Well, what kind of commendation is that?  Our race is being driven unto Olam Ha-ba, and you want us to desist from thought because we would come up with something that has flaws?  That’s what it sounded like.

your implicit claim that a philosophical system or political movement can address man’s most personal and intimate problem, is patently wrong.

You are still staring into a divide that does not really exist.  Ask yourself what would happen politically if the complete failure of liberalism to speak to our nature was transformed, and man had history as well as futurity, if he was (more) grounded in himself, as in past generations.  The Western personality is the true battlefield on which the life of our race will be decided.

That is genuinely superficial, to think that life’s deeper meanings are only accessed when working with English genetics.

Life’s deeper meanings are accessed when consciousness of self is at work.  You of all people know that.  Also, what’s this about “English genetics”.  The consequences of knowing oneself even a little (we call it racial consciousness) include a clear presumption for kind.  I should not need to explain this to anyone who has spent some time among nationalists.

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:02 | #

The proper way to view money (and the Money Power)(italics mine):

Moreover, Mises revived the critical monetary insight of Ricardo and the British Currency School of the first half of the nineteenth century: that while money is a commodity subject to the supply-and-demand determination of value of any other commodity, it differs in one crucial aspect. Other things being equal, an increase in the supply of consumer goods confers a social benefit by raising living standards. But money, in contrast, has only one function: to exchange, now or at some time in the future, for capital or consumer goods. Money is not eaten or used as are consumer goods, nor used up in production as are capital goods. An increase in the quantity of money only serves to dilute the exchange effectiveness of each franc or dollar; it confers no social benefit whatever. In fact, the reason why the government and its controlled banking system tend to keep inflating the money supply, is precisely because the increase is not granted to everyone equally. Instead, the nodal point of initial increase is the government itself and its central bank; other early receivers of the new money are favored new borrowers from the banks, contractors to the government, and government bureaucrats themselves. These early receivers of the new money, Mises pointed out, benefit at the expense of those down the line of the chain, or ripple effect, who get the new money last, or of people on fixed incomes who never receive the new influx of money. In a profound sense, then, monetary inflation is a hidden form of taxation or redistribution of wealth, to the government and its favored groups and from the rest of the population. Mises’s conclusion, then, is that, once there is enough of a supply of a commodity to be established on the market as money, there is no need ever to increase the supply of money. This means that any supply of money whatever is “optimal”; and every change in the supply of money stimulated by government can only be pernicious. - Rothbard

Posted by maunder on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:26 | #

“How economic theory came to ignore the role of debt”

by Michael Hudson

http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/rwer-issue-57-michael-hudson/

“Starting from David Ricardo in 1817, the historian of economic thought searches in vain through the theorizing of financial-sector spokesmen for an acknowledgement of how debt charges (1) add a non-production cost to prices, (2) deflate markets of purchasing power that otherwise would be spent on goods and services, (3) discourage capital investment and employment to supply these markets, and hence (4) put downward pressure on wages.”

...

”[Ricardo] set about to convince voters (still made up mainly of property holders) that the nation’s economic problems were not caused by debt deflation, but by the Corn Laws, as Britain’s agricultural tariffs were called. These high tariffs supported high domestic prices for agriculture on the logic that high food prices would support rental earnings that could be invested to increase output. Over time this would enable Britain to replace imports with higher domestic production levels. But Ricardo argued that higher prices merely would give protected industries a free lunch, above all in the form of land rent, assuming no investment of this revenue to enhance productivity.”

...

Ricardo was the first major economist to be a financier since John Law, who had managed France’s Mississippi Bubble a century earlier, in the 1710s. At first glance it seems ironic that a bond broker should have developed classical trade theory in a way that viewed exchange essentially as barter rather than analyzing of how public and private-sector debt levels influenced production costs. Of all people who should have been aware of the financial elements of costing, it would seem that a bond broker would have had a comparative advantage in incorporating such considerations into his trade theory. Yet one looks in vain for a discussion of how debts and the taxes to carry them affected prices and international pricing.

Today, global competitiveness in automotives, steel-making and other capital-intensive industries turns less on wage rates than on variations in the cost of financing investment – interest rates and debt/equity ratios, taxes, subsidies and land or rent charges. Yet such financial considerations do not appear as elements of production cost in Ricardo’s value theory, nor do they appear in today’s Chicago School monetarism that stands in line with Ricardian doctrine. By focusing on labor-time proportions, Ricardo implied that non-labor expenses such as interest did not really matter. As for taxes, they mattered to the extent that import tariffs forced up the price of labor’s food and other necessities, but there was no memory of the long analytic tradition that attributed taxes to the Funding System’s interest payments on the public debt. Hence, the policy conclusion of Ricardo’s comparative labor-time approach to international trade theory was not that nations should avoid going into debt, but that they should abolish their tariffs to lower prices.

This limited approach implicitly took bond brokers and bankers off the hook from accusations that their debt charges impaired the nation’s well being. Ricardo’s advocacy of free trade and its consequent specialization of production among countries promised to create a growing commercial loan market and an even larger bond market to finance transport infrastructure such as railroads, canals and shipbuilding.

No prior economist had claimed that public and private debt levels did not affect competitiveness. Yet this is what Ricardo’s trade and value theory implied by not acknowledging any impact of debt service or that monetary stringency had to be imposed to stem the drain of bullion to pay foreign creditors. In these respects he was like an individual viewing the world around him, but not seeing himself (or in this case, finance) in the picture. He denied that paying foreign debts had any serious economic impact, depicting them as being self-financing by an automatic monetary adjustment process. This approach rationalized the kind of deflationary austerity imposed today on hapless debtor countries, providing the conceptual foundation for modern IMF and World Bank austerity doctrines.

Inasmuch as money and credit are forms of debt, one would think that monetarists working for central banks, finance ministries and business schools would analyze the debt burden and its interest charges, but they have followed Ricardo’s shift of emphasis away from discussing its impact. Yet so powerful was his labor theory of value – powerful largely because of its abstraction, not its economic realism – that it led subsequent generations to speculate about how economies might function if debt and other non-labor costs had no effect on national competitiveness, living standards and the polarization of incomes and wealth.

Posted by maunder on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:02 | #

This means that any supply of money whatever is “optimal”

What a crock of shit.

According to the tautological, sophistical bullshit that is Austrian theory, “optimality” is completely determined by “subjective value” and “free exchange” that reflects that value.

So if liquid assets (money) are concentrated in a few hands, and there are starving families, and there is nothing the families can trade (labor, goods) for the liquid assets held by a few because the few just don’t feel like it or want them to starve or whatever (it’s all subjective don’t you know) and of course the families can’t steal because property rights are inviolate, then the families starving to death is the “optimal” scenario. Or if the only things from the starving families acceptable for trade are wives and daughters as sex slaves, then that trade is “optimal”.

Any change in the supply of liquid assets upsets this “optimality”, you see. After all, it might end up in the starving families’ hands and the few might not get their sex slaves.

Nobody who takes sociobiology seriously can take this garbage seriously except maybe as a case study on the kinds of virulent mind viruses certain population groups seem adept at producing.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:58 | #

Moral accounting cannot be bad
A pound of flesh need be had
Jesus Crisis,
calling von Mises
send Haller, Bible and 10 key pad

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:31 | #

Anyone care to define liberalism?

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:58 | #

Maunder,

You are so confused I wouldn’t know where to begin a response (what you are going on about has nothing to do with Rothbard’s point in the passage I copied above).

I did look at the mostly ridiculous blog you linked, and in one recent entry calling for more (more?!?) “stimulus”, I left this comment:

All true, no doubt, but where are you headed with this? “Stimulus”? WTF is that? You mean Obongo’s 2009 $814 billion giveaway of precious capital to the state level public sector unions, so they could keep on consuming, despite their total lack of usefulness?

I don’t think very many on this rather ridiculous blog really understand much about economics [nb -applies to MR, too]. We in the West are now experiencing what conservatives long predicted: the crisis of the welfare/Keynesian interventionist state. Too many parasites, too few net wealth creators. Admittedly, too much financialization (itself the product of our dysfunctional statist system), and too little real production. Our only hope is :

a. massive deregulation;
b. elimination of unions (at least in the public sector);
c. firing of several million govt “workers” (including hundreds of thousands of worthless, tenured leftist professors, esp the ones teaching Marxism);
d. abolition of Fed + fractional reserve banking, and return to 100% gold dollar;
e. comprehensive privatization (eg, why do we have govt airports?);
f. auction of extraction rights to federal lands and seacoasts (eg, drill, baby, DRILL!!!);
g. massive elimination of govt spending at all levels, esp outside of basic scientific research, law enforcement, and national defense/homeland security;
h. end to foreign aid, most foreign bases (let Europeans pay their own damn defense bills), US involvement in IMF, World Bank and allied institutions;
i. elimination of market efficiency reducing affirmative action programs;
j. elimination of federal subsidization of “education”, esp the “higher” type (a huge, ongoing waste of money, taxpayer and parental - re-allow corporations to test hires for IQ);
k. get US out of Iraq and Afghanistan;
l. put repatriated troops on the border with Mexico;
m. deport all illegal aliens, and end all legal immigration of anyone without a scientific PhD;
n. eliminate all taxation of businesses, as well as investment;
o. institute a much lower flat tax, and radically simplify the tax code;
p. NO MORE HARASSMENT OF BUSINESSES WITH THREAT OF GLOBAL WARMING HORSESHIT LEGISLATION.

I just wrote this list off the top of my head. I do not mean to imply that it is comprehensive, but, if implemented as is, the US would be well on its way to a massive economic boom, with accelerating growth into the future.

The problem is not free markets - but the LACK of them.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:28 | #

Anyone care to define liberalism?

How about: Jesus Christ’s second reinterpretation.

Posted by maunder on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:16 | #

The purpose of the link was to highlight the critique of Ricardo. Which is why it wasn’t merely linked but extensively quoted and bolded. It’s a sound critique and you completely ignored it. That’s a habit of yours, Haller.

Austrian economics is parasite economics, it’s just that the parasites are the money powers rather than public bureaucrats.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:36 | #

Interesting thread

The autonomy of the individual is held as sacred not because the individual is competent, but because the alternative - which is that some state-controlled mechanism step in to legislate some aspect of our lives - is always less competent. People are stupid and function from unconsciousness - well guess what - any collective or movement or state-sponsored action is just going to be a bunch of people. They will actually do worse trying to meddle, than individuals do, even if those individuals appear to be struggling. That is the insight of individual autonomy and on the level on which it is supposed to hold, it holds.

And precisely what ‘level’ does it hold and what are the exceptions when it does not? BTW never heard of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomenon?

OK so I guess collective action and planning, during say WWII, was a waste of time? Everyone knows governments can screw up badly but this knee jerk attitude of “at all times and in all circumstances they are evil” is just ideological dogma. As is the wider Hayekian revulsion at planning as though planning is not central in the life of every organisation that wishes to survive for more than five seconds.

Anyway back to the social versus individualism. Really what annoys about liberals and worse still libertarian buffoons is there seemingly total ignorance of Darwin and Darwinian social evolution. Please try reading Frank, or Hamilton, or Maynard Smith, or even David Sloan Wilson. As for those authors being ‘too difficult’ well purchase a biology dictionary for the hard words and the maths involved is not much more than high school algebra and some calculus – can it be that difficult for such towering intellects?

But at a less cerebral level it’s their massive egotism and total ingratitude to the past that irks me. As if they could ever enjoy the range of possibilities in their terrible exciting free-floating autonomous state, if it were not for the collective and cumulative efforts of our culture and history. Yet they feel no duty to honour the past nor any responsibility to the future. Both intra-generational and inter-generational ‘free-riders’ with at its base this attitude: ME! ME! ME! NOW! NOW! NOW! It’s the political outlook of a toddler.

As John Donne accurately observed no man is an island. Even Mill’s harm principle is practically useless because individuals, even the most radically autonomous, exist within a network of social interactions and responsibilities.

Take the drugs issue for example. Does not the coke head have duties and obligations to his/her spouse, neighbours, employer etc.? Let alone the issue of cultural ‘externalities’. Do you want your children growing up in an atmosphere in which such things are culturally, if not legally, normalised? The harm is almost never completely self-directed or self-limiting. Social-capital is destroyed by unrestricted licence. And the drugs issue is interesting in that say cocaine use is generally illegal in most nations but the ‘permissive’ society (if it feels good do it) has de facto made it widely acceptable and semi-decriminalised.

To quote Theodore Dalrymple:

“Perhaps we ought not be too harsh on Mill’s principle: it’s not clear that anyone has ever thought of a better one. But that is precisely the point. Human affairs cannot be decided by an appeal to an infallible rule, expressible in a few words, whose simple application can decide all cases, including whether drugs should be freely available to the entire adult population. Philosophical fundamentalism is not preferable to the religious variety; and because the desiderata of human life are many, and often in conflict with one another, mere philosophical inconsistency in policy—such as permitting the consumption of alcohol while outlawing cocaine—is not a sufficient argument against that policy. We all value freedom, and we all value order; sometimes we sacrifice freedom for order, and sometimes order for freedom. But once a prohibition has been removed, it is hard to restore, even when the newfound freedom proves to have been ill-conceived and socially disastrous.”

I wonder where precisely does this self-authored, radically autonomous individual belong – with belonging being the key term – probably nowhere I think. Radical hyper-individualism is as much a utopian project as communism or any other you might wish to think of. Why? Because taken to its logical extreme societies could not successfully endure exist under it’s premises: there is much more to a community and its long-term health than reducing all inter-personal interactions to contracts (let alone the social equivalent of Hobbes ‘war of all against all’). The notion that something he or she wants to do might eventually be collectively disastrous and socially destructive is not the uppermost thought in the libertarians mind. Let a thousand ‘self-authored’ flowers bloom even if we just end up with a garden full of toxic weeds.

Of course this is not to say that liberal notions are totally invalid but it’s not the whole of the truth about human needs, wants or existence. What is deadly has been our switch so that liberal theory and assumptions are given foundational status rather than being a limited, secondary, ideology. Furthermore bad liberalism drives out the good and necessarily corrective elements of other political and philosophical traditions so that liberalism has ‘full spectrum dominance’ within Western discourse, culture, and praxis – with ever increasingly toxic effects.

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:10 | #

there is nothing the families can trade (labor, goods)

Now here you are short-sighted, maunder my boy.

The starving family can exchange their children for goods & services — thereby becoming Ricardian traders for Rothbardian freedom!

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:24 | #

f. auction of extraction rights to federal lands and seacoasts (eg, drill, baby, DRILL!!!);

I agree with all your itemata save this one. Here, indeed, you seem to be contradicting your own stated concern for environmental welfare, Haller. But quite apart from the environment, pumping more crude from the earth for use by car-/plane-obsessed Americans will not help them mature politically in the least. Let’s be square — what you outline amounts to a sort of forced maturation of the American project. Feeding their petrol habit with more drilling will only your retard efforts. Rather force manufacturers to adapt more to hybrids and electric, with a view toward ultimate re-adaptation to localism, thus curtailing long-distance travel by private citizens.

Or you have to attach conditions to f. such as elimination of car racing, monster truck shows, motorcycle gangs, RVs over x size tank, adoption of Oregon-style emissions testing, etc. etc. But those are austerity and not Austrerity measures, which disrupts “are freedumb”, at which Americans have little experience.

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:26 | #

will only your retard efforts.

lolzolzozozlzz;;zolzlz

i just woke up!

retard your efforts

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:02 | #

The purpose of the link was to highlight the critique of Ricardo. Which is why it wasn’t merely linked but extensively quoted and bolded. It’s a sound critique and you completely ignored it. That’s a habit of yours, Haller.

Austrian economics is parasite economics, it’s just that the parasites are the money powers rather than public bureaucrats. (maunder)

—————————————————

I don’t really know why I bother ...

First, the passage I excerpted from Rothbard on Mises on money had nothing to do with debt - the subject on which you extensively quoted. So why would I have discussed it?

Second, I am no expert on Ricardo, nor do I intend to become one. I do know that Rothbard was not a follower of Ricardo: he thought the latter’s “labor theory of value” a disaster, paving the way for Marxism. Rothbard is simply noting that Ricardo understood that money differed from all other commodities in that an increase in its supply confers no general benefit (as money). Are you disputing this?

Third, your diatribe about starving families and liquid assets and optimality was likewise irrelevant to the Rothbard passage, and extremely confused. R’s point was merely than any supply of money can be optimal: there is nothing outside of the market to determine such optimality, and that increasing the amount of money does not increase real wealth (obviously). Fairly straightforward stuff, which you needlessly “complexified”.

Fourth, re-reading the excerpt on Ricardo, I completely fail to see its relevance to any comment of mine. I’m not a Ricardian, nor do I think that debt levels have no effect on national competitiveness. Nor would any Austrian.

Fifth, honestly, your paragraph on the starving families is a masterpiece of confusion - a pure straw man argument. How did these families get in this situation? What has that fact to do with Austrian economics? In a word, what was your point? (Indeed, what exactly was the thesis of the critique of Ricardo you excerpted?)

Sixth, explain this statement of yours

Austrian economics is parasite economics, it’s just that the parasites are the money powers rather than public bureaucrats

in light of the fact that Austrians are the world’s leading critics of central (and fractional) banking.

I don’t think you (and others bloviating on The Money Power) actually have the faintest idea what you’re talking about .

Lastly, just to see whether you are merely confused, or a true socialist, what in my list of policy changes a. through p. to improve the economy (which you ignored), do you disagree with?

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:37 | #

f. auction of extraction rights to federal lands and seacoasts (eg, drill, baby, DRILL!!!);

I agree with all your itemata save this one. Here, indeed, you seem to be contradicting your own stated concern for environmental welfare, Haller. But quite apart from the environment, pumping more crude from the earth for use by car-/plane-obsessed Americans will not help them mature politically in the least. Let’s be square — what you outline amounts to a sort of forced maturation of the American project. Feeding their petrol habit with more drilling will only your retard efforts. Rather force manufacturers to adapt more to hybrids and electric, with a view toward ultimate re-adaptation to localism, thus curtailing long-distance travel by private citizens.

Or you have to attach conditions to f. such as elimination of car racing, monster truck shows, motorcycle gangs, RVs over x size tank, adoption of Oregon-style emissions testing, etc. etc. But those are austerity and not Austrerity measures, which disrupts “are freedumb”, at which Americans have little experience. (ANON/UH)

——————————————————————-

I’m talking about getting the economy moving again. Ideally, you may be correct, and certainly any abstract nationalist economics will wish to preserve the nation’s soil, as well as its blood.

But I’m talking about the real world, which includes building political coalitions to do the right thing (don’t think that’s hard? look at the invincible idiocy displayed about things economic around this site; the ignorance of the average voter is still more egregious). The economy-killing Leviathan state will not be deconstructed overnight; desocializing the USA, which is the only hope a mature economy has for rapid improvement, will be a long process, if it even gets started.

So anything to help smooth the transitional period has a use, even if ideally there does need to be a greater alignment between the market and the biosphere in which the former is embedded. Energy is a huge input into the economy, and we have a lot of resources that govt regs are preventing from getting extracted. The price of greater pollution or whatever now is worth it, if it helps to overcome political resistance to the discombobulating pro-market changes that must be implemented for long-term prosperity.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:01 | #

Devotions: Upon Emergent Occasions, Together with Death’s Duel

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:06 | #

This one, Graham?

http://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:46 | #

Just had a thought!

Mr. Haller you need an anthem for white Zion…this seems good.

Alternatively it could double up as the new American anthem. It would be more accurate, yes?

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:52 | #

I prefer this for Uncle Sam

Land of of the free - how blind can you get?
Are you heaven on Earth or the gloom of the grave?
Are your stars still so bright?

Honestly I do like most Americans I just hate the crazy ideology that is your foundational political mythology.

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:26 | #

Honestly I do like most Americans I just hate the crazy ideology that is your foundational political mythology.

The problem is that the Americans you’re dealing with here do not believe in the political mythology. Bit of a straw man situation. Ok, “White Zion” is the sort of idea that would come to a member of the archetypal propositional nation. But understand it’s just a thought experiment. We are desperate for a way out, not the crazy ideologues of your imagination and press demonizing.

Still waiting for my W.D. Hamilton pour les nuls recommendation.

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:20 | #

Bankers are the problem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6fcMD_oERE&feature=player_embedded#!

Posted by Mr Voight on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:26 | #

Because I have invested in various American insurance and bank stocks which themselves have invested in European bank debt, as well as Greek sovereign debt, therefore I should be stiffed of my (aliquot share of corporate) money?

Usury is not a legitimate way of making money.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:41 | #

Amor ipse notitia est.

Love is already in itself a way of knowing.

Liberalism whispers in our ear – all you need is self-indulgent self-love – the false, tawdry, cheap narcissism of me, me, me!  A masturbatory political philosophy. Nothing legitimately can or should prevent and block the putative liberal’s ‘free-floating’ shallow existence, his unbearable lightness of Being. No desire – however perverse, individually or socially damaging can be forbidden – the only thing to be forbidden is to offer a negative judgement on this ‘freedom’.

So we are little more than Leibniz’s Monadology made egocentric flesh. We have nothing in common but our contractual agreements - mainly not to interfere with one another as we go about seeking our ‘private’ pleasures and miseries. The common good is a dangerous and evil concept. One generation owes nothing to any other. One person owes nothing to any other except to be non-judgemental and not to interfere or intervene ever.

According to Leibniz, monads differ in quality, and no two monads are exactly alike. Each monad has its own individual identity. Each monad has its own internal principle of Being. A monad may undergo change, but this change is internally determined. Changes in the properties of any monad are not externally determined by other monads. The liberal monad is of course a proto-Nietzschean. Via his ‘will to power’ he is totally sovereign – he is not shaped in myriad ways by history, culture, language, his sex, his ethnic origins, his family, his education or anything one could thing of – no he, through his own sheer will, is self-authored. He does not stand on the shoulders of giants – he is a giant. He is also utterly deluded.

Authentic love involves, in part, how you we are seen and judged in the eyes of others. The wish to share with our beloved, to belong and to be at home in the world with them. To curb our worse qualities and behaviour in order to appear lovable to both them and ourselves, to seek the blessing of best of the past and to be judged positively by the future. But the liberal only exists in the ever present ‘now’ and the world of immediate self-gratification; he owes nothing to posterity and even less to those that will inherit his baleful legacy. It isn’t a pretty sight. Let alone a radically incomplete and unsustainable understanding of the human condition.

P.S. I was just having some fun with Laibach.

Posted by The Madness of Globalism on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:11 | #

The Madness of Globalism:

U.S. now importing Chinese shoppers to buy its Chinese goods http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/10/03/decline_watch_us_now_importing_chinese_shoppers_to_buy_its_chinese_goods

For the first time, lawmakers, businesses and even White House officials are courting consumers from cash-rich countries such as China, India and Brazil to fill the nation’s shopping malls and pick up the slack for penny-pinching Americans. They are wooing travelers with enticements such as coupons, beauty pageants and promises of visa reform. The payoff, they say, could be significant: 1.3 million new jobs and an $859 billion shot in the arm for the economy over the next decade.

Guo Hui, 37, who lives in Beijing, recently returned home from a two-week tour of Yellowstone National Park, Houston and Los Angeles. He estimated he spent $2,000 to rent a car and pay for gas and lodging for himself and his wife. Then there was the Ed Hardy T-shirt, the Apple laptop, the HP laptop, even baby food and formula for his child, totaling an additional $6,000.

Still, Guo said prices are significantly cheaper than in China — a pair of Adidas sneakers costs only $25 at a U.S. outlet mall.

“For that price in China, you can’t even buy counterfeits,” he said.

the idea of kick-starting an economic recovery by attracting Asian shoppers to the United States to buy goods that are, for the most part, made in Asia doesn’t sound all that sustainable. The fact that Guo flew back over the Pacific with a pair of shoes that probably were shipped over the Pacific from Indonesia a few months earlier and that he saved money in the process sounds frankly ridiculous.

Americans cannot consume because of too much debt, and the Money Power does not want to free their debt slaves no matter what. So the Money Power is now trying to insource scab consumers, scab consumers who have served as the Money Power’s scab labor.

Posted by anon / uh on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:48 | #

The liberal monad is of course a proto-Nietzschean. Via his ‘will to power’ he is totally sovereign – he is not shaped in myriad ways by history, culture, language, his sex, his ethnic origins, his family, his education or anything one could thin[k] of – no he, through his own sheer will, is self-authored. He does not stand on the shoulders of giants – he is a giant. He is also utterly deluded.

So are you, if this is your understanding of Nietzsche.

And how can something post-Nietzsche be “proto-Nietzschean”?? lozlzolzozlzlz

ps i totally agree

Posted by Sam Wydch on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:50 | #

Graham_Lister hits another one—or two, or three—out of the ballpark! (What else is new?) More of GuessedWorker’s long-winded indefatigability in online proselytization…more grammar-sniping from Søren Renner…

I lubs all u niggaz. Plus this site, which I too seldom contribute to…

My genes will miss yours if our kind go extinct. Let’s do what we can to see to it that never happens.

P.S. What’s with all the Nick Griffin/BNP-bashing? The online and real-world presence of the BNP, not to mention Nick Griffin’s effective political stunts, aren’t hurting ethnopolitics. If anything, they’re making converts. The BNP could always be better, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. Griffin’s achieved more for ethnonationalism than anyone else in the Anglosphere in recent history (sad to say), unless I’m overlooking something major…

Posted by Leon Haller on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:03 | #

Usury is not a legitimate way of making money. (Voight)

Of course it is. Why would someone take the risk, and accept the cost, of lending money, if not for interest? An interest charge is the price for a loan. Those who give loans need to be compensated.

Despite my Catholicism, it is my understanding that the Church’s refusal to allow for usury during the Middle Ages - a position the great Spanish Scholastics later revealed to be not at all an inherent part of theological doctrine - was a key element in holding back the growth and expansion (and power) of Europe.

Amazing how old errors never seem to stay refuted.

Posted by maunder on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:18 | #

The Church didn’t disallow usury. It granted a monopoly on usury to the Jews and some Italians here and there. There were monopolies on usury/money lending/credit creation dominated by Jews. Just as there are de jure and de facto monopolies on usury/money lending/credit creation today that are largely dominated by Jews.

The Austrian “time preference” theory of interest is a theoretical construct that has nothing to do with how the world actually works. The historical and empirical evidence show that the usurers do not actually take the risk, and do not pay the costs for their monopoly and for the protection of their property rights. They’re granted de jure or de facto monopolies by state power that enforce debts, they lend against real assets that they can centralize, and they have incentives to lend in a predatory fashion because they can usually acquire assets at fire sale prices even if there are bad loans with the backing of state power. And debts tend to grow much faster than the ability to pay because they obey mathematical laws of compounding interest rather than physical laws of nature that our economy depends on, resulting in increasing output being funneled to the usurers.

The “Spanish Scholastics” you refer to are the School of Salamanca, which is based on the work of a Jewish converso. It attacked the Just Price theory which was one of the first theories of economic rent and promoted a “subjective value” theory which tends to obscure, conceal, or ignore economic rent and thus rent-seeking behavior which Jews live off of and depend on for survival.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:23 | #

Take the drugs issue for example. Does not the coke head have duties and obligations to his/her spouse, neighbours, employer etc.?

Mr. Lister’s ignorance and arrogance, knows no bounds.

I fully admit that the mischief which a person does to himself, may seriously affect, both through their sympathies and their interests, those nearly connected with him, and in a minor degree, society at large. When, by conduct of this sort, a person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding class, and becomes amenable to moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term. If, for example, a man, through intemperance or extravagance, becomes unable to pay his debts, or, having undertaken the moral responsibility of a family, becomes from the same cause incapable of supporting or educating them, he is deservedly reprobated, and might be justly punished; but it is for the breach of duty to his family or creditors, not for the extravagance. If the resources which ought to have been devoted to them, had been diverted from them for the most prudent investment, the moral culpability would have been the same. George Barnwell murdered his uncle to get money for his mistress, but if he had done it to set himself up in business, he would equally have been hanged. Again, in the frequent case of a man who causes grief to his family by addiction to bad habits, he deserves reproach for his unkindness or ingratitude; but so he may for cultivating habits not in themselves vicious, if they are painful to those with whom he passes his life, or who from personal ties are dependent on him for their comfort. Whoever fails in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference, is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it, nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it. In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. Whenever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law.

http://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/four.html

The malaise that today falls upon the Western world and in particular upon the Anglo-Saxon homeland and diaspora cannot be laid at Mill’s feet. It is the perversion of his classical liberalism that is the culprit. If memory serves, Salter holds Mill up as an example of the first universal nationalist. For Mill, freedom and homogeneity were as one. One can not survive without the other.

Posted by Leon Haller on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:33 | #

On Juan de Mariana:

http://www.jesushuertadesoto.com/fronts/frontdemariana.htm

http://mises.org/daily/3937

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 01:42 | #

Enormous conflation of interest, fractional (loans out of nothing) reserve, and usury.

The problem is the fractional- NOT the charging of interest per se.

Banking- lending without fractional, would indeed be a very marginally profitable business.

The historic rate of interest was 3 to 6 percent.  A bank has say 1 million ounces (gold) on (time) deposit, loaned out a 6 percent.  It pays depositors 3 percent.  60k ounces come in as interest, 30k ounces are paid out, leaving a profit of 30k ounces of gold.  Right?  Oh wait, I forgot a little detail called operating expenses.  Office leases, management salaries, accounting costs, and a thousand other items.  These must be subtracted.  Maybe 3000 ounces left as net profit- 3/10 of one percent based on the deposits of 1M ounces.

Non-fractional banking would be about as profitable as your local coin dealer (percentage-wiae)

INTEREST IS NOT USURY.  USURY IS LOANS MADE UP FROM NOTHING.

Posted by maunder on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:40 | #

Even without fractional reserve banking, you see the conditions mentioned above surrounding usury/money lending:

“usurers do not actually take the risk, and do not pay the costs for their monopoly and for the protection of their property rights. They’re granted de jure or de facto monopolies by state power that enforce debts, they lend against real assets that they can centralize, and they have incentives to lend in a predatory fashion because they can usually acquire assets at fire sale prices even if there are bad loans with the backing of state power. And debts tend to grow much faster than the ability to pay because they obey mathematical laws of compounding interest rather than physical laws of nature that our economy depends on, resulting in increasing output being funneled to the usurers.”

This is because usury/money lending among strangers requires state power to enforce. We lend and borrow among friends and family all the time as a part of daily life since we know them well, there is trust, and there are internal methods of “enforcing” promises made. But with increasing scale and greater distance (social, cultural, genetic, etc.) state power becomes necessary to enforce promises among strangers. And from this association and relationship between the State and Money comes Money Power.

There aren’t “pure” “free markets” of usury and money lending among strangers with no state power. Unlike simple exchange or trade which can exist to a degree between strangers without an overarching state enforcer. For example European explorers making a simple trade with American Indians. Both sides are complete strangers, see and inspect each other’s wares, make the trade, conclude the transaction then and there, and part their ways. Money lending between strangers cannot occur in a similar fashion. State power is necessary to enforce. An honor code only goes so far, and with increasing distance (social, cultural, genetic, etc.) between strangers, there is a decreasing shared sense of honor, different codes of honor.

Posted by maunder on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:59 | #

Usury is economic rent seeking. It is being able to jack up the price due to de facto and de jure monopoly privileges provided by state power.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 05:41 | #

Excellent summary, maunder. Possibly of interest, The Moral Menace of Roman Law and the Making
of Commerce: Some Dutch Evidence

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1652&context=fss_papers

Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:39 | #

PF[,]

Meanwhile Captain Chaos’ vision for the world,

You sound more like Silver by the day.  Why?  Is it because you feel your personal prospects, and therefore your reproductive fitness, are impinged upon to the degree that you consciously submit to, say, even the attitudinal orientation that race realism (e.g., niggers are dumb and they might rob you - so avoid them) might produce?  LOL.  That’s weak, dude!  Notice that Uh’s changed take on WN has coincided with his discovery of Game - lolluszzzooolllllllssszzzz.

Learn some fucking (Day) Game and stop taking it out on GW.  lol

And ask GW this specific question in lieu of stoning him with popcorn: If “Dasein” is indeed a specific psychological state which can be experienced by European-derived people within the context of their extant neurology (and if not then according to GW’s own standards it does not exist), then what are its salient subjective features?  Unless “Being” is bullshit this question can be answered.

Posted by maunder on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:43 | #

Thank you, Desmond. And thanks for the link. Looks interesting.

Posted by lulzzzozzzlooosszzzlulz on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:10 | #

I recall self-professed “Alpha” Jim Giles said he would roll up on some bitchez and say, “I’m racial” [read: “I hate niggers!”], and expect them to spread ‘em (the White bitchez, I mean, not the niggers) on the spot.  Is that what aspiring junior-egghead habitues of MR expect not to happen?  Is that why they now bring their dour and pseudo-enlightened scepticism of racialism to what Richards calls this “holy place”?  lol Knock the goddamn wax out of your ears, and the cobwebs out of your heads.  Please.

P.S.  And anyone with balls can answer this question (assuming they have balls): If “Dasein” is indeed a specific psychological state which can be experienced by European-derived people within the context of their extant neurology, then what are its salient subjective features?

Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:50 | #

@Desmond Jones

Arrogant and ignorant - wow I am really becoming more American like - a joy to behold, yes?

Very nice quote Desmond thus providing more evidence if any were really needed that Mill’s harm principle is a fairly useless concept. Obviously outside of genuine hermits most people operate within a social context so there are few actions that do not have an impact, in some way, upon others.

I knew Mill changed his position later on actually because the Dalrymple article I used a quote from discussed that very fact and if you had read the article you would have know that, as I did by reading the entire thing when it was first published.

However the key point is that the rather restrictive conditions set on Mill’s central harm premise does NOT stop liberals of all strips from constantly invoking this most ‘thin’ of concepts in all manner of socially toxic ways does it?

Primarily I think of the obvious psychological attractiveness of this incoherent ideology is that of a Mephistopheles-like figure whispering in our ears: “you can and must have anything you want - it is your right. You are master of your fate, you are self-authored and accept no restriction or negative judgement upon yourself.”

Yes hedonistic licence appeals to a lot of people - it’s part of the human condition to be selfish but mature people and societies cultivate other virtues. But by making liberalism foundational to Western praxis we have effectively infantilized ourselves. The culture of a screaming toddler: “I want, I want, I want.” Even worse the confusion between wants and needs has almost been obliterated.

Let’s take a real world example: the sex-change. This is not a genuine medical procedure but a liberal ideological fantasy made in grotesquely butchered flesh. The ‘need’ to change sex is nothing of the sort; it is a want which somehow is becoming a right. Yet there are appetites which only grow with the feeding and are both individually and socially damaging. This is one of them.

A person claims they ‘need’ a sex-change operation. What is the responsible thing do to? One might tell the truth and ease the patient out of their obvious delusions. Firstly, the real condition is a deep psychological problem not a physical one with being the ‘wrong’ sex. Secondly, the therapeutic view that all of life’s problems have some quick technical fix (surgery will solve all my problems) is false. The self-willed butchery of such a pseudo-medical procedure, in that it is not physically necessary except in some, (very few), newborn infants, will not solve any of the genuine medical issues the patient has. And lastly a man does not become a woman because his penis is removed and he takes female hormones daily. Rather he becomes a bad simulacrum of a woman.

Now this procedure is about indulging a dangerous and destructive delusion, an ill-formed want which is actually harmful for the individual and for society at large. Why? Well it pushes the envelope of the possible - it signals this is now an acceptable life-style choice. So we got from position with almost no adults undergoing this procedure to an exponential growth in them with physically normal adolescents as young as 14/15 being offered this ‘treatment’ in many Western nations. This appetite increases with its feeding. We shouldn’t feed it.

And the liberal response? “well it’s his body, he’s only harming himself, if it make him happy what’s the problem?” - of course if everyone made this choice it would probably be the end of society but that’s how the liberal cookie crumbles, yes?

Again for sensible people we need a view on the relative harms of behaviour and that this apply both at an individual and social level. Some forms of stupidity are the price we pay for freedoms - there are trade-offs - for example freedom of expression and ideas is generally a good thing with positive benefits but unfortunately it also allows libertarians to prattle on constantly - but freedom it is never the blank check of liberal fantasy without terrible consequences. Which brings us neatly back to Mill and his own recognition that his harm principle is totally useless in nearly all substantive cases - unfortunately his modern followers do not really understand that.

Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:24 | #

However the key point is that the rather restrictive conditions set on Mill’s central harm premise does NOT stop liberals of all strips from constantly invoking this most ‘thin’ of concepts in all manner of socially toxic ways does it?

For the lemmings “direct harm” can be expanded to encapsulate whatever harms the Tube tells them it is allegedly their “human right” to be shielded from.  And as PF says without saying it, if you let them in on this fact the lemmings may think you are an asshole.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:44 | #

But, CC, discussion of how to make lemmings’ migrationary instinct safe for them again does not involve turning them against that instinct.  It involves reconstructing the landmass their instinct tells them to swim to.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:13 | #

Yes ‘rights-inflation’ is part of the hyper-liberal zeitgeist - however the respond is not to say that all rights are bogus - maybe at one level they are ‘nonsense upon stilts’ - but don’t tell a property owner that. The audience for such a message is vanishingly small - it’s an idea that cannot be sold. The problems of rights-inflation really is not as simple as saying - “What did we want! No rights now!”

Posted by Captainchaos on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:31 | #

The problem of the “hyper-liberal zeitgeist” and “rights-inflation” is solved by suckering the lemmings into giving you power and then brainwashing the lemmings according to your own designs.  Just as the Fuhrer did - lol.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:46 | #

Hypnosis, unfortunately, is the fate of the suggestible through the ages, CC.

Posted by anon / uh on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:48 | #

The point of the ‘movement’ is to get enough power so that we can begin to coerce people.

The problem of the “hyper-liberal zeitgeist” and “rights-inflation” is solved by suckering the lemmings into giving you power and then brainwashing the lemmings according to your own designs.  Just as the Fuhrer did - lol.

to paraprhrase Linder lolzozozlzlzzz;zozllzzlz

“WITH TIME, THINGS GO UH-WARD.”

LOZLZLOZOZLZLZLZLZZZ!!!!

excpte u cant revewrse butthex hudnreds fo millzionz of bernaqnkifed fiat-menschen !! lozzllz gotta destroy teh nitrogien factorrises that rbing millonz of these people to life thru sub dsbzided agrikulchur lozlzlozlzolzololz

war on the dark masses is war on agriculture destroy the nitrogen fixers and u destroy its fruitz; w/out that u jes bildung wee sand castlez on the seashore at evening LOLZOZLZOZLZOZLZ’;;‘LZZ

question: how to induce forced maturation in a population that is entirely the creation of subsidized agriculture, lending, debt, and artificial consumer appetite??, i.e. frankenmenschen

gotta “death to the fed”
as old apollonian has always said

raze the rice paddies
scorch the wheat fields
torch the corn crop
bomb the grain silos ( — execute FEMA operatives)
dismantle the fert plants
etc. etc.
but this amounts to reversing technology, which is only possible in a-stan: hence “threat” posed by talibaan lozlzozlzlz was less abt “training terrorists” or “al qaeda” as it was a living reproach to the zeigeissssst

Posted by anon / uh on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:52 | #

Yes ‘rights-inflation’ is part of the hyper-liberal zeitgeist

it begins with food-inflation
nix the food, you nix all the fiatmenschen clamoring for “rights” asnd butthex-on-demand

Posted by anon / uh on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:07 | #

LOLZLOZLZOLZZZZ

all this talk of rights n shitt

kulchur-man vs economic man

how can we tell the pre-op he’s full of shit??? lozlzlzozlzlzzlozoz

xsplat is here to save u all from deluzn

http://xsplat.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/1286/

Society didn’t change for social reasons. It changed for technological reasons.

Unless you can undo the available technologies, you won’t undo the social changes.

The arrow of time is not cyclic. Technology is a one way parabola. The future is not going to be a shiny new version of the past.

[...]

Yes, I was being binary, in order to hammer home the point that society is embedded in technology, and that you can’t change the social changes that happen due to technology, without changing technology.

Farming changed society in a way that can not be socially reversed.

The industrial revolution did the same.

The pill did the same.

You can’t socially construct what is not socially constructed.

People follow opportunity, and opportunity that is created by technology can not be altered socially.

Sexual or drug prohibition are but a few examples.

  <~~~ pay heed grahamy-wammy!! lozlzozlz

Posted by anon / uh on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:35 | #

and its only worsening lolzozlozlzozlz

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_resnick_welcome_to_the_genomic_revolution.html

attn to 2:50 and 6:35 on

haber-bosch prozess

+

govt subsidy

+

oneworldism

+

fiat populations

+

“rise of the rest” (e.g. chinese genomics)

= no chance for whitey

Posted by Leon Haller on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:05 | #

Glorious, corruscating economic rationality ... (learn something, please, people) ... (Thank you, Murray) ...

The Fallacy of the “Public Sector”
by Murray N. Rothbard

We have heard a great deal in recent years of the “public sector,” and solemn discussions abound through the land on whether or not the public sector should be increased vis-à-vis the “private sector.” The very terminology is redolent of pure science, and indeed it emerges from the supposedly scientific, if rather grubby, world of “national-income statistics.” But the concept is hardly wertfrei; in fact, it is fraught with grave, and questionable, implications.

In the first place, we may ask, “public sector” of what? Of something called the “national product.” But note the hidden assumptions: that the national product is something like a pie, consisting of several “sectors,” and that these sectors, public and private alike, are added to make the product of the economy as a whole. In this way, the assumption is smuggled into the analysis that the public and private sectors are equally productive, equally important, and on an equal footing altogether, and that “our” deciding on the proportions of public to private sector is about as innocuous as any individual’s decision on whether to eat cake or ice cream. The State is considered to be an amiable service agency, somewhat akin to the corner grocer, or rather to the neighborhood lodge, in which “we” get together to decide how much “our government” should do for (or to) us. Even those neoclassical economists who tend to favor the free market and free society often regard the State as a generally inefficient, but still amiable, organ of social service, mechanically registering “our” values and decisions.

One would not think it difficult for scholars and laymen alike to grasp the fact that government is not like the Rotarians or the Elks; that it differs profoundly from all other organs and institutions in society; namely, that it lives and acquires its revenues by coercion and not by voluntary payment. The late Joseph Schumpeter was never more astute than when he wrote, “The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”[1]

Apart from the public sector, what constitutes the productivity of the “private sector” of the economy? The productivity of the private sector does not stem from the fact that people are rushing around doing “something,” anything, with their resources; it consists in the fact that they are using these resources to satisfy the needs and desires of the consumers. Businessmen and other producers direct their energies, on the free market, to producing those products that will be most rewarded by the consumers, and the sale of these products may therefore roughly “measure” the importance that the consumers place upon them. If millions of people bend their energies to producing horses-and-buggies, they will, in this day and age, not be able to sell them, and hence the productivity of their output will be virtually zero. On the other hand, if a few million dollars are spent in a given year on Product X, then statisticians may well judge that these millions constitute the productive output of the X-part of the “private sector” of the economy.

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor, and capital-goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them “productively” because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need: automobiles, for example, rather than buggies. Therefore, while the statistics of the total output of the private sector seem to be a mere adding of numbers, or counting units of output, the measures of output actually involve the important qualitative decision of considering as “product” what the consumers are willing to buy. A million automobiles, sold on the market, are productive because the consumers so considered them; a million buggies, remaining unsold, would not have been “product” because the consumers would have passed them by.

Suppose now that into this idyll of free exchange enters the long arm of government. The government, for some reasons of its own, decides to ban automobiles altogether (perhaps because the many tailfins offend the aesthetic sensibilities of the rulers) and to compel the auto companies to produce the equivalent in buggies instead. Under such a strict regimen, the consumers would be, in a sense, compelled to purchase buggies because no cars would be permitted. However, in this case, the statistician would surely be purblind if he blithely and simply recorded the buggies as being just as “productive” as the previous automobiles. To call them equally productive would be a mockery; in fact, given plausible conditions, the “national product” totals might not even show a statistical decline, when they had actually fallen drastically.

And yet the highly touted “public sector” is in even worse straits than the buggies of our hypothetical example. For most of the resources consumed by the maw of government have not even been seen, much less used, by the consumers, who were at least allowed to ride in their buggies. In the private sector, a firm’s productivity is gauged by how much the consumers voluntarily spend on its product. But in the public sector, the government’s “productivity” is measured — mirabile dictu — by how much it spends! Early in their construction of national-product statistics, the statisticians were confronted with the fact that the government, unique among individuals and firms, could not have its activities gauged by the voluntary payments of the public — because there were little or none of such payments. Assuming, without any proof, that government must be as productive as anything else, they then settled upon its expenditures as a gauge of its productivity. In this way, not only are government expenditures just as useful as private, but all the government need to do in order to increase its “productivity” is to add a large chunk to its bureaucracy. Hire more bureaucrats, and see the productivity of the public sector rise! Here, indeed, is an easy and happy form of social magic for our bemused citizens.

The truth is exactly the reverse of the common assumptions. Far from adding cozily to the private sector, the public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society — far from satisfying the wants of consumers — are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desired by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. In many cases, the private consumers obtain nothing at all, except perhaps propaganda beamed to them at their own expense. In other cases, the consumers receive something far down on their list of priorities — like the buggies of our example. In either case, it becomes evident that the “public sector” is actually antiproductive: that it subtracts from, rather than adds to, the private sector of the economy. For the public sector lives by continuous attack on the very criterion that is used to gauge productivity: the voluntary purchases of consumers.

We may gauge the fiscal impact of government on the private sector by subtracting government expenditures from the national product. For government payments to its own bureaucracy are hardly additions to production; and government absorption of economic resources takes them out of the productive sphere. This gauge, of course, is only fiscal; it does not begin to measure the antiproductive impact of various government regulations, which cripple production and exchange in other ways than absorbing resources. It also does not dispose of numerous other fallacies of the national product statistics. But at least it removes such common myths as the idea that the productive output of the American economy increased during World War II. Subtract the government deficit instead of add it, and we see that the real productivity of the economy declined, as we would rationally expect during a war.

In another of his astute comments, Joseph Schumpeter wrote, concerning anticapitalist intellectuals, “capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success a victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”[2] The indictment has certainly been changing. In the 1930s, we heard that government must expand because capitalism had brought about mass poverty. Now, under the aegis of John Kenneth Galbraith, we hear that capitalism has sinned because the masses are too affluent. Where once poverty was suffered by “one-third of a nation,” we must now bewail the “starvation” of the public sector.

By what standards does Dr. Galbraith conclude that the private sector is too bloated and the public sector too anemic, and therefore that government must exercise further coercion to rectify its own malnutrition? Certainly, his standard is not historical. In 1902, for example, net national product of the United States was $22.1 billion; government expenditure (federal, state, and local) totaled $1.66 billion, or 7.1 percent of the total product. In 1957, on the other hand, net national product was $402.6 billion, and government expenditures totaled $125.5 billion, or 31.2 percent of the total product. Government’s fiscal depredation on the private product has therefore multiplied from four to five-fold over the present century. This is hardly “starvation” of the public sector. And yet, Galbraith contends that the public sector is being increasingly starved, relative to its status in the nonaffluent 19th century!

What standards, then, does Galbraith offer us to discover when the public sector will finally be at its optimum? The answer is nothing but personal whim:

There will be question as to what is the test of balance — at what point may we conclude that balance has been achieved in the satisfaction of private and public needs. The answer is that no test can be applied, for none exists.… The present imbalance is clear.… This being so, the direction in which we move to correct matters is utterly plain.[3]
To Galbraith, the imbalance of today is “clear.” Clear why? Because he looks around him and sees deplorable conditions wherever government operates. Schools are overcrowded, urban traffic is congested and the streets littered, rivers are polluted; he might have added that crime is increasingly rampant and the courts of justice clogged. All of these are areas of government operation and ownership. The one supposed solution for these glaring defects is to siphon more money into the government till.

But how is it that only government agencies clamor for more money and denounce the citizens for reluctance to supply more? Why do we never have the private-enterprise equivalents of traffic jams (which occur on government streets), mismanaged schools, water shortages, and so on? The reason is that private firms acquire the money that they deserve from two sources: voluntary payment for the services by consumers, and voluntary investment by investors in expectation of consumer demand. If there is an increased demand for a privately owned good, consumers pay more for the product, and investors invest more in its supply, thus “clearing the market” to everyone’s satisfaction. If there is an increased demand for a publicly owned good (water, streets, subway, and so on), all we hear is annoyance at the consumer for wasting precious resources, coupled with annoyance at the taxpayer for balking at a higher tax load. Private enterprise makes it its business to court the consumer and to satisfy his most urgent demands; government agencies denounce the consumer as a troublesome user of their resources. Only a government, for example, would look fondly upon the prohibition of private cars as a “solution” for the problem of congested streets. Government’s numerous “free” services, moreover, create permanent excess demand over supply and therefore permanent “shortages” of the product. Government, in short, acquiring its revenue by coerced confiscation rather than by voluntary investment and consumption, is not and cannot be run like a business. Its inherent gross inefficiencies, the impossibility for it to clear the market, will insure its being a mare’s nest of trouble on the economic scene.[4]

Posted by Leon Haller on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:06 | #

[And Part 2 (notice also how to write properly, and with clarity and style) ...]

In former times, the inherent mismanagement of government was generally considered a good argument for keeping as many things as possible out of government hands. After all, when one has invested in a losing proposition, one tries to refrain from pouring good money after bad. And yet, Dr. Galbraith would have us redouble our determination to pour the taxpayer’s hard-earned money down the rathole of the “public sector,” and uses the very defects of government operation as his major argument!

Professor Galbraith has two supporting arrows in his bow. First, he states that, as people’s living standards rise, the added goods are not worth as much to them as the earlier ones. This is standard knowledge; but Galbraith somehow deduces from this decline that people’s private wants are now worth nothing to them. But if that is the case, then why should government “services,” which have expanded at a much faster rate, still be worth so much as to require a further shift of resources to the public sector? His final argument is that private wants are all artificially induced by business advertising, which automatically “creates” the wants that it supposedly serves. In short, people, according to Galbraith, would, if let alone, be content with nonaffluent, presumably subsistence-level living; advertising is the villain that spoils this primitive idyll.

Aside from the philosophical problem of how A can “create” B’s wants and desires without B’s having to place his own stamp of approval upon them, we are faced here with a curious view of the economy. Is everything above subsistence “artificial”? By what standard? Moreover, why in the world should a business go through the extra bother and expense of inducing a change in consumer wants, when it can profit by serving the consumer’s existing, uncreated wants? The very “marketing revolution” that business is now undergoing, its increased and almost frantic concentration on “market research,” demonstrates the reverse of Galbraith’s view. For if, by advertising, business production automatically creates its own consumer demand, there would be no need whatever for market research — and no worry about bankruptcy either. In fact, far from the consumer in an affluent society being more of a “slave” to the business firm, the truth is precisely the opposite: for as living standards rise above subsistence, the consumer gets more particular and choosy about what he buys. The businessman must pay even greater court to the consumer than he did before: hence the furious attempts of market research to find out what the consumers want to buy.

There is an area of our society, however, where Galbraith’s strictures on advertising may almost be said to apply — but it is in an area that he curiously never mentions. This is the enormous amount of advertising and propaganda by government. This is advertising that beams to the citizen the virtues of a product that, unlike business advertising, he never has a chance to test. If Cereal Company X prints a picture of a pretty girl declaiming that “Cereal X is yummy,” the consumer, even if doltish enough to take this seriously, has a chance to test that proposition personally. Soon his own taste determines whether he will buy or not. But if a government agency advertises its own virtues over the mass media, the citizen has no direct test to permit him to accept or reject the claims. If any wants are artificial, they are those generated by government propaganda. Furthermore, business advertising is, at least, paid for by investors, and its success depends on the voluntary acceptance of the product by the consumers. Government advertising is paid for by means of taxes extracted from the citizens, and hence can go on, year after year, without check. The hapless citizen is cajoled into applauding the merits of the very people who, by coercion, are forcing him to pay for the propaganda. This is truly adding insult to injury.

If Professor Galbraith and his followers are poor guides for dealing with the public sector, what standard does our analysis offer instead? The answer is the old Jeffersonian one: “that government is best which governs least.” Any reduction of the public sector, any shift of activities from the public to the private sphere, is a net moral and economic gain.

Most economists have two basic arguments on behalf of the public sector, which we may only consider very briefly here. One is the problem of “external benefits.” A and B often benefit, it is held, if they can force C into doing something. Much can be said in criticism of this doctrine; but suffice it to say here that any argument proclaiming the right and goodness of, say, three neighbors, who yearn to form a string quartet, forcing a fourth neighbor at bayonet point to learn and play the viola, is hardly deserving of sober comment. The second argument is more substantial; stripped of technical jargon, it states that some essential services simply cannot be supplied by the private sphere, and that therefore government supply of these services is necessary. And yet, every single one of the services supplied by government has been, in the past, successfully furnished by private enterprise. The bland assertion that private citizens cannot possibly supply these goods is never bolstered, in the works of these economists, by any proof whatever. How is it, for example, that economists, so often given to pragmatic or utilitarian solutions, do not call for social “experiments” in this direction? Why must political experiments always be in the direction of more government? Why not give the free market a county or even a state or two, and see what it can accomplish?

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. He was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher.

[1] In the preceding sentences, Schumpeter wrote,
The friction of antagonism between the private and the public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact that … the state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [New York: Harper and Bros., 1942], p. 198)
[2] Ibid, p. 144.
[3] John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 320–21.
[4] For more on the inherent problems of government operations, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Government in Business,” in Essays on Liberty (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y: Foundation for Economic Education, 1958), vol. 4, pp. 183–87.

Posted by TabuLa Raza on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:14 | #

A “debate” between capitalism and socialism ain’t possible, as one can see here.  Socialism, and statism in general, is a product of the age of unreason.  Hermann Goring:  “If the Fuhrer wants it two and two make five.”  Mr. Goring was a devotee of Keynesian mathematics.

And Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht was a Keynesian, like Dr. Bernanke.  Returning from the Soviet Union, Lord Keynes dropped in to pay a visit to Dr. Schacht.

The Nutzi hate for liberalism is derived from hate for reason and objectivity, as one can plainly see here.  No communication is possible.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:52 | #

It nice to see who at heart is a liberal and who is not or rather more subtly for whom some version of liberal values constitute their primary and foundational premise and starting point. Needless to say I think the USA is the liberal nation par excellence and I think the various commentators at MR show this in a rather obvious way. Furthermore it seems to me that such radically different sensibilities exist between the European and the American that any useful overlap is probably negligible.

No Western European nation has ever conceived itself as a social experiment in individualistic liberty in the way that the USA has; nor has any modern nation more fully absorbed its foundational mythologies than the USA. This probably because that there is too much history in Europe. In a kingdom (or under the cultural legacy of an aristocratic order) no-one is under the illusion that they too, if only they worked hard enough can be King one day. If nothing this history of an organic, stable and obviously non-liberal social hierarchy, offers some residual resistance to the total acceptance of the superficial mythology of self-authorship.

Coincidently is not Nietzsche a radical proponent of the self-authored individual? The ‘will to power’ is nothing but a radical reformation of liberal tropes into a formulation for the ‘all-powerful’ superman to do whatever his strength and abilities allow for. Perhaps this disdain and challenging of any external constraints or limitations upon the ‘superman’ is why it seemingly appeals to emotional and psychological adolescents of all ages. After all does not the angry teen dream of joyfully throwing off ever petty rule of the adult world, particularly of their parents? Perhaps our putative ‘supermen’ delusionally fantasize about throwing of every limitation wrongly imposed upon them and finally exercising their unrestricted, unbounded will. For most grown-up, sensible, well-balanced people such antinomianism has a distinctly tinny tone, as they rightly regard the emotional register of their teen years as a temporary phase that one moves beyond into maturity. Is the psycho-political dynamics of liberal theory underpinned by an adolescent sensibility?

Incidentally Roger Scruton in his ‘Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey’ discusses post-modernism as a form of radical evil. And what is post-modernism other than a cultural manifestation of liberalism, in extremis. As a very young man I dismissed the notion of evil let alone Scruton’s argument. Now perhaps a reassessment is in order.

OK final thoughts but if it were economically efficient for the USA to import a million Mexicans per year why, in principle, can the libertarian, free-floating, profit-maximizing, good to honest free-marketeer object? Other than from some particular and oddly irrational dislike of Mexicans? Hardly compelling as a proposition to be accepted by less prejudiced more forward-thinking libertarians is it?

Random thought – what might the collective noun for a collection of libertarians? Answers on a postcard to GW perhaps?

Back to my point…equally one might make a compelling case based upon efficiency for killing everyone that reaches 65. Jonathan Swift did something similar with the idea of eating infants (but for satirical purposes Leon – please don’t any ideas about a new and exciting investment opportunity). Perhaps reading something like ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ for more insight into the numerous blind-spots of instrumental rationality might be a worthwhile exercise? Ignore that after all I’m alleged to be grotesquely ‘ignorant’ and ‘trash’.

The issue is that any optimization process has both a starting position/values and boundary conditions. In the realm of human affairs these boundary conditions and starting points are the very stuff of political choice, value judgements and moral commitments. No society is simply a ‘natural’ phenomenon handed down from above by God…whisper it not even America…and shockingly some of us do not think contemporary America represents the ne plus ultra of human possibilities. For some of us the ‘freedom’ enjoyed at the American mall is one of Dante’s circles of Hell.

Is the thought simply too painful to bare for Americans that the endpoint in their experiment upon founding a social order on the premise of individualistic liberalism is their rapid marginalisation and self-authored destruction? Hence the fairly hysterical reaction to suggestions that America, as a socio-political order, isn’t the answer to any sensible question.

Ohh booooooooo! Sorry I’ll get with the program.

America is best rah rah rah! USA number 1 (ad infinitum).

Posted by anon / uh on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:42 | #

Coincidently is not Nietzsche a radical proponent of the self-authored individual?

No.

The ‘will to power’ is nothing but a radical reformation of liberal tropes into a formulation for the ‘all-powerful’ superman to do whatever his strength and abilities allow for.

No.

Perhaps this disdain and challenging of any external constraints or limitations upon the ‘superman’ is why it seemingly appeals to emotional and psychological adolescents of all ages.

No.

After all does not the angry teen dream of joyfully throwing off ever petty rule of the adult world, particularly of their parents?

No.

Perhaps our putative ‘supermen’ delusionally fantasize about throwing of every limitation wrongly imposed upon them and finally exercising their unrestricted, unbounded will.

No.

Is the psycho-political dynamics of liberal theory underpinned by an adolescent sensibility?

Yes.

Jonathan Swift did something similar with the idea of eating infants

I did something similar above with the idea of exchanging them for goods & services. It was a very fine joke you seem to have missed in your breathless quest to condemn as American heresy any detailed discussion of economic theory.

The issue is that any optimization process has both a starting position/values and boundary conditions.

I wonder if you are aware that you are using here the terms of an American Jew, Herbert Simon.

No society is simply a ‘natural’ phenomenon handed down from above by God…

What of pancakes and Pancake Day?

The tradition is said to have originated when a housewife from Olney was so busy making pancakes that she forgot the time until she heard the church bells ringing for the service. She raced out of the house to church while still carrying her frying pan and pancake. The pancake race remains a relatively common festive tradition in the UK, and England in particular, even today. Participants with frying pans race through the streets tossing pancakes into the air, catching them in the pan whilst running.

No pancake without agriculture and stratified labor. The affirmation of Englishhood is also the affirmation of the poor eating bread of chalk and flour.

Is the thought simply too painful to bare for Americans that the endpoint in their experiment upon founding a social order on the premise of individualistic liberalism is their rapid marginalisation and self-authored destruction?

Um. Why yes, Graham, marginalisation and self-destruction may be painful things to have to realize. But it is happening to your people as well, which is why conservatives like Mark Steyn can sell books by filling them with gloomy alarmist references to “the Islamicization of Europe”. So we all have our crescent to bear.

 

If nothing this history of an organic, stable and obviously non-liberal social hierarchy, offers some residual resistance to the total acceptance of the superficial mythology of self-authorship.

Now sell that to Chantal & Steve out in Hackney.

Posted by Graham_Lister on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 01:50 | #

Oh dear simply saying no a lot isn’t really an argument now is it? Touch a raw never with you superman? Or do you prefer monadology as social reality?

Anyways I thought Nietzsche was all about the myriad of interpretations - how can one interpretation possibly be better or worse for the little proto-POMO guy with the gay moustache?

Isn’t the superman a self-authored, unrestricted, anti-social, freedom-loving (for himself obviously) kick ass figure? A quasi-liberal without the manners beating up we untermensch…well just because he can and it’s one hellva lot of fun. Think Chuck Norris with bigger words, right?

I really really don’t understand why the ‘secret’ liberals here are quite so defensive. Is there an American that isn’t deep within his bones a liberal? I guess that in the modal logic sense it must be a possible state of affairs.

Seriously why is so painful to admit it? The foundational ideological narrative of the USA is drawn from Enlightenment liberalism. Deal with it.

Now the difficultly you good-old boys have seems to be in the travel of direction - liberalism has been an asymmetrical ideology in American life. What do I mean? It is far more likely to expand in its scope than diminish - indeed this has been the pattern. Unfortunately because liberalism is such a nebulous, Janus-faced, plastic ideology no-one can really control the direction it develops in. And it drives out other non-liberal ideologies achieving ‘full spectrum dominance’.

Is there actually an American in public life today that doesn’t assert, in one way or another, that individual liberty is the highest of all possible values? It just they have minor disagreements over what this means.

It’s not really possible to say I just want the good liberalism of say 1791 but no more. Liberalism doesn’t work like that. It’s an inflationary ideology - wants become needs and so on in all sorts of unexpected and bizarre ways. Sex-change surgery Sir? Well of course it’s your right!

Posted by Guest Lurker on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:39 | #

Graham_Lister:  “Sex-change surgery Sir? Well of course it’s your right!”

Apparently, it’s now also the right of repulsive yiddish dykes to transform their 11 year-old adopted little boy into a girl. Has anyone seen this?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043345/The-California-boy-11-undergoing-hormone-blocking-treatment.html

Posted by Desmond Jones on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:30 | #

Mr. Lister,

However the key point is that the rather restrictive conditions set on Mill’s central harm premise does NOT stop liberals of all strips from constantly invoking this most ‘thin’ of concepts in all manner of socially toxic ways does it?

It would if it remained as Mill envisioned: the state protects discrimination. The perversion, of which you allude to, is that the state protects the discriminated. In other words the state protects the socially toxic in aid of ‘human rights’. Freedom in Mill’s model trumped human rights. In the modern model human rights trumps freedom. And we know full well who led the charge to circumcise the pig.

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:50 | #

I don’t know enough Nietzsche to be at all confident in my judgement of him.  But the impression I get is that if one processed only his base presumptions of (i) the impossibility of objectivity, and (ii) “slave morality” as a self-defeat that must be left behind with the dead Christian God, resulting in the new, exultant life of the Ubermensch, one arrives pretty much at a sort of proto-pomo version of self-authoriality.

However, I’m happy to be corrected because Nietzsche has always seemed too stagey to hold much appeal for me, and I haven’t made the effort to read him seriously - indeed have not read him for nearly forty years.

Posted by Leon Haller on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:27 | #

Graham,

You’ve written some interesting and insightful stuff around the last several posts, but I can’t help feeling there is a lot of mutually incomprehensible barbs being bruited about ... talking at cross purposes ... (‘apples and oranges’) ...

I’d like to respond (to you and a few others) on matters of economics as well as the philosophical status of the individual, but I’m not exactly sure what there is for me to grapple with, as you keep destroying “straw-men”; eg, that all espousers of free market doctrines are, at bottom, anthropological liberals who (must?) hold to a belief in “self-authorship” or radical individuality, which you find factually/ontologically preposterous (I happen to agree with your rejection of the ‘autonomous self’; I disagree with the notion that love of individual liberty, or preference for juridical equality, or empirical recognition of the superior economic productivity of free (individual-directed) markets, necessarily commits one to this appropriately criticized adolescent ontological atomism).

So I have some clear-the-air questions.

1. Can one be a non-liberal supporter of free markets?

2. How would you describe your preferred political economy, and in what concretely does it consist?

3. Do you believe in any juridical realm of individual liberty or autonomy?

4. Even assuming the socially constituted ‘self’, do you see any merit in centuries of classical liberal criticism against arbitrary government, against unequal applications of laws, and in favor of strong private property rights, and limited government?

5. Is there any rough percentage of government spending of GDP beyond which you would hesitate to go (outside of national emergencies; eg, the Battle of Britain)?

I could probably come up with many more such boundary-setting inquiries, but I don’t wish to be presumptuous. Answering these will give me a better sense of where exactly you stand in relation to those of us you dismiss as mere “classical liberal racists” (not that that’s a bad position in itself - I have just described Thomas Jefferson, and many of America’s Founders).

Posted by anon / uh on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:04 | #

But the impression I get is that if one processed only his base presumptions of (i) the impossibility of objectivity, and (ii) “slave morality” as a self-defeat that must be left behind with the dead Christian God, resulting in the new, exultant life of the Ubermensch, one arrives pretty much at a sort of proto-pomo version of self-authoriality.

I can’t BELIEVE I have to explain this to you “of all people”. Grahamy-wammy ok, he has the scientist’s myopia for German philosophy.

The critique of slave morality and its desired abandonment by a select class symbolized by Uebermensch was intended for our betterment. A booster shot for post-Christian, anti-liberal immunity. The whole notion, as far as I’m able to discern its origins, is a stew of Lutheranism (per Hollingdale), Darwin, and Las Casas’ Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, wherein Buonaparte reveals his grand plan for an école d’Europe for the sons of nobility and worthy applicants to rear a future class of autocratic rulers with broadly conservative principles in the old style.

That’s all you need to know. It is a shame you and Grahamy-wammy have absorbed the zeitgeist narrative of what he’s about, reducing him to a kind of “juvenile” 60’s Randian and such caricatures. Whatever though; people who need Nietzsche to be this or that are legion. Have a look at Why We Are Not Nietzscheans by Ferry et al. for a group of French intellectuals finally admitting they were all wrong, engaging in serious & systematic doublethink or blatant misinterpretation, to appropriate him.

Dismissing Nietzsche is exactly what They wanted men like you to do. The project was exactly to purge or pathologize his works of conservative / radical right content and highlight the anarchic aspects. So footnotes were appended to every unflattering remark about Jews, syphilis and butthex0ring were alleged to neutralize his truths about women, etc., then nicely repackaged, slipped between the Jew greats Marx and Freud. And in fact there is plenty of resonance among the three, but saying so won’t help the case.

(i) ought not to be taken in isolation. In fact it is paired with a naturalistic perspective which completely endorses (if anticipates and gets wrong) your own perspective drawn from sociobiology. Unlike what the po-mos have given you to believe, it isn’t a matter of “well as nothing is objectively valid let’s all go wild, I fucking LOVE all this subjective entartete kunst!!!”, but rather meant as a corrective to certain dominant narratives, chief among the Christian, the liberal-philanthropic, and the socialist. How anyone can miss this very obvious and vehement strain in N’s writings — if one has not merely flipped through Zarathustra armed with stupid preconceptions, like Graham — that the academic Left has taken immense pains to erase, reinterpret, ignore and pathologize for its benefit is absolutely staggering to me, but what do I know, as an American I am approximately a ghost flitting between liberal abstractions and Reagan-worship, or something.

Posted by danielj on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:47 | #

Leon,

God is not a fan of the free-market despite what that senile, geriatric Gary North says. Ancient Israel was a socialistic theocracy with access to resources distributed evenly and a generational reshuffling of “capital” to ensure constant leveling of inequality.

Take up the matter with Him.

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:30 | #

Anon/Uh,

I found your last comment valuable. Keep on flitting.

Posted by anon / uh on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:05 | #

thanks dude. just don’t knock my taste in broads.

Posted by Leon Haller on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:49 | #

Brilliant comment from PF, early on. Sorry I failed to note it before.

danielj,

Although I am not a particular fan of Gary North, I dissent from your criticism of him. He is certainly neither senile nor stupid. He has also explored the relation between Scripture and economics as much as perhaps any living person.

More significantly, I dissent from your comment re God not being a “fan” of free markets. God is not a fan of anything human, except exhibitions of moral excellence. Moreover, Christianity is highly ideologically elastic; one can be a good Christian, and nevertheless adhere to a wide (but by no means unlimited) array of political systems. As a theologically liberal Catholic, I happen even to believe that men can be saved absent fidelity to Christ, based on right will or charitable character (so perhaps GW or Dr. Lister might be saved - maybe even Jimmy Marr, too, ... maybe ... Linder, however, is either headed to Hell, or at least, again per my Catholicism, a long spell in Purgatory).

But there are some economic systems closer to the Christian spirit, as well as more conducive to both Christian charity (that is, more enabling of the conditions for the exercise of Christian virtue), as well as maximizing resource efficiency. The free market fits both descriptors.

Finally, two Biblical points. First, I do not accept the OT as literally true. I am not a fundamentalist. Nor do I pretend to be competent to evaluate your claim re Ancient Israel’s alleged socialism (“tribal collectivism” might fit better), though I must say your claim is unfamiliar to me.

Second, the OT was superseded with the coming of Christ. Thus, for example, the Jews are no longer “the Chosen” (sometimes expressed as “the Church is Israel now”). And what may have obtained in the specific context of ancient Israel, especially outside the realm of fundamental moral theology, is largely irrelevant to post-OT peoples, living under very different circumstances.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:07 | #

According to Paul, Jews were still the chosen people because God never repeals his blessings.

The Jews are enemies of God only with regard to the Good News, and enemies only for your sake; but as the chosen people, they are still loved by God, loved for the sake of their ancestors. God never takes back his gifts or revokes his choice. [Romans 11:28-29]

In fact he goes further in stating that the Jewish refusal to accept Christ enabled the Gentiles to be saved. Jews were the salvation of Gentiles.

Posted by danielj on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:15 | #

Leon,

Although I am not a particular fan of Gary North, I dissent from your criticism of him. He is certainly neither senile nor stupid.

I didn’t call him stupid.

He has also explored the relation between Scripture and economics as much as perhaps any living person.

And yet he still sounds like Rothbard so unless you consider Human Action canonical, I’m going to have to dissent from your assessment.

More significantly, I dissent from your comment re God not being a “fan” of free markets. God is not a fan of anything human, except exhibitions of moral excellence.

The Good Lord doesn’t think or feel or plan either. It’s called an anthropomorphism. It helps us simpletons to understand the infinite.

Moreover, Christianity is highly ideologically elastic; one can be a good Christian, and nevertheless adhere to a wide (but by no means unlimited) array of political systems.

Non-sequitur. It doesn’t follow that Christianity is as you say simply because it tolerates some dissension from its members on non-essentials but bene note, I’m not conceding that one’s position on economics is non-essential and that the Scriptures aren’t dogmatic about the issue.

As a theologically liberal Catholic, I happen even to believe that men can be saved absent fidelity to Christ

?!?!? That’s bad. Even for a Catholic. However, you’ve described reactionary and prejudicial anti-Lutheranism more so than the Catholic Worker theology.

based on right will or charitable character (so perhaps GW or Dr. Lister might be saved - maybe even Jimmy Marr, too, ... maybe ... Linder, however, is either headed to Hell, or at least, again per my Catholicism, a long spell in Purgatory).

Christ simply desires that we all be civilized, tea-drinking Anglos keen on gentility on your understanding of the Scriptures?

But there are some economic systems closer to the Christian spirit, as well as more conducive to both Christian charity (that is, more enabling of the conditions for the exercise of Christian virtue), as well as maximizing resource efficiency. The free market fits both descriptors.

I think the system described and prescribed by God Himself in the books of the Law is probably the closest.

Finally, two Biblical points. First, I do not accept the OT as literally true. I am not a fundamentalist.

Even if I grant you that it isn’t literally true (which I most emphatically do not), it doesn’t change my point if you grant that it is there for an example.

Nor do I pretend to be competent to evaluate your claim re Ancient Israel’s alleged socialism (“tribal collectivism” might fit better), though I must say your claim is unfamiliar to me.

The way they divvied up the land, the way debts were forgiven, the priestly caste maintained at the expense of the general populace and many other minute law for economic interactions amongst the people make it pretty clear that “tribal collectivism” was indeed the prescription.

Second, the OT was superseded with the coming of Christ.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Thus, for example, the Jews are no longer “the Chosen” (sometimes expressed as “the Church is Israel now”).

The Jews were never “the Chosen” Leon. The Chosen were always the chosen. They were incidentally Jews before Christ (almost uniformly) and are almost entirely Gentiles now a day.

And what may have obtained in the specific context of ancient Israel, especially outside the realm of fundamental moral theology, is largely irrelevant to post-OT peoples, living under very different circumstances.

I beg to differ.

Greg Bahnsen has many excellent books on the subject. It is called Theonomy.

Posted by anon / uh on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:29 | #

“Salvation is of the Jews.”

LOLZXOLZZOLZOZLZZLZLZ;ZZLZLZZLZ

butthexed by religiong

Posted by Jimmy Marr on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:58 | #

Leon Haller: I happen even to believe that men can be saved absent fidelity to Christ, based on right will or charitable character (so perhaps GW or Dr. Lister might be saved - maybe even Jimmy Marr, too, ... maybe ... Linder, however, is either headed to Hell, or at least, again per my Catholicism, a long spell in Purgatory).

Of course there’s a Purgatory, Leon. You’re living in it. And, there’s no way out, but through the Jews.
The life of your savior clearly reveals this, but you won’t accept it because it will get you killed. But inasmuch as you’re going to die anyway, why not die telling the truth? THAT is fidelity to Christ, and contrary to your wishful thinking, you will NOT be saved without it.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

Posted by danielj on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:47 | #

I’m not saying “tribal collectivism” anymore. It’s redundant. Tribalism will suffice.

Posted by Revolution Harry on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:10 | #

This one’s for Guessedworker, if he’s around.

[url=http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=35360]Judaism’s Strange Gods and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.
[/url]

Posted by Revolution Harry on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:11 | #

Mmm, not sure what happened there. Try this.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=35360

Judaism’s Strange Gods and the Struggle for the Soul of the West.

Posted by Revolution Harry on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:21 | #

According to Paul, Jews were still the chosen people because God never repeals his blessings.

Who is the Israel of God Now?

Since the Jews were rejected as God’s chosen nation, then who does the promise go to now and who are Jews and Israel today? Paul states in Galatians 6:16 that there is the Israel of God and in 1 Corinthians 10:18, Paul speaks of the Israel after the flesh. The Israel of the flesh are those that are Jews by birth and the Israel of God is anyone who belongs to Christ and is under the New Covenant. The majority of Christians fail to understand the simple truth that if we are Christ’s then we are spiritual Jews and the Israel of God. The New Covenant was only made with the House of Israel and so those choosing to reject this very clear and plain truth cannot be under the New Covenant. Note in the following passage that Paul speaks of two Israels and declares that the literal seed of Abraham is no longer the Israel of God today.

Romans 9:6-8 “Not as though the word of God has taken none effect. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: 7 Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall your seed be called. 8 That is, They which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed.”

Paul further clarifies that the children of the flesh (Jews by birth) are not the children of God but the children of the promise are. So who are the children of the promise now? Galatians 3:28-29 explains this in a manner that cannot possibly be misunderstood and Romans 2:28-29 is also very clear.
Galatians 3:28-29 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you be Christ’s, then are you Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

Romans 2:28-29 “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: 29 But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.”

When the Jewish council rejected God’s message from Stephen (Acts 6:8-7:60) and stoned him, this ended the 490 years God gave Israel to end their rebellion and sin against Him. (Daniel 9:24) When Daniel’s 70 weeks concluded, the following points of scripture came into effect. He is not a Jew which is one outwardly, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly and so if we are Christ’s then we are Abraham’s seed and thus children of Israel and heirs according to the promise. So when the Bible speaks of the Jews after this time, it is referring to spiritual Jews and the Israel of God. This is anyone who belongs to Christ.

Posted by Bill on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:03 | #

Yesterday, 6th October 2011, BBC’s Mark Easton reported on BBC’s prime time News that a study has concluded that there are far more British of mixed parentage than at first thought.  I understand that a more in depth study took place later on BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight.

Britain: More mixed than we thought

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15164970

I see there is an article referring to same in to-day’s Daily Mail.

Two million of mixed race living in Britain and they may be the nation’s biggest ethnic minority

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046197/British-population-Are-mixed-race-people-Britains-biggest-ethnic-minority.html

Celebratory salivating.